Today’s businesses must be able to survive the loss of data by planning recovery alternatives. Backup and restore services focus on fault tolerance of data by preventing disastrous data loss.
Your storage solution must protect against catastrophes or data erasure, whether malicious or accidental. Typically, you need to provide a regular backup solution. In addition, snapshot technology can defend against data loss by maintaining a point-in-time version of files until you can back up the data, or until you need to clear the space for other purposes.
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Storage Requirement |
Novell OES Solution |
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Data protection against major loss: The ability to back up, archive, and restore network data. |
The Novell Storage Management Services (SMS) infrastructure is supported by all the major backup/restore application vendors. Novell SMS allows backup/restore application vendors to fully protect all Novell metadata, including file system access control lists, inherited rights filters, and complex data such as databases, email post offices and mailboxes, and eDirectory objects and attributes. For information, see the OES 11 SP3: Storage Management Services Administration Guide for Linux. |
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Data protection against intermediate loss: The ability to make immediate, anytime backup of network data with snapshots of storage pools. |
NSS pool snapshots allow you to back up active data at any time. Snapshot tools are integrated into the web-based management interfaces. The snapshot function is independent of hardware vendors, even for a mix of vendors. Users can view and select file versions from active snapshot volumes. Snapshot data inherits the rights of the original data. For information, see |
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Data protection for local user data: The ability to back up, archive, and restore user data that is stored locally on the desktop or laptop. |
Novell iFolder 3.x enables users to be more productive from work and home by providing resources to back up their local files, synchronize them, and make them accessible anywhere, anytime, from any computer. For information, see the Novell iFolder 3.x Administration Guide. |
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File version archive and retrieval: The ability to save versions of files at scheduled times and store them in an archive database for easy retrieval by users, allowing them to recover lost, deleted, or modified files. |
Novell Archive and Version Services provides support for self-service file versioning. It allows users to locate and restore earlier versions of files on specified volumes. The archive database can be on the same server or a different server than the source volumes. A browser-based, self-service interface allows users to view and restore a previous file version. This can be done at a subdirectory level, a file type level, multiple subdirectories, volume, or any combination. It also shows who the last modifier of the file was. For information, see the OES 11 SP3: Novell Archive and Version Services Administration Guide. |
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Safeguards against inadvertent access to data: The ability to protect against configuration mistakes by restricting which storage areas a server can access. |
NSS provides virtualized LUN masking in SANs. Whenever you allocate devices to a server, NSS makes them unavailable to other servers. NSS multiple server access prevention (MSAP) prevents against accidental activation of physically shared pools of storage on multiple servers at the same time. For information, see |
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Data protection for a variety of file systems: The ability to protect data stored in a variety of file system formats and levels of data storage formats. |
Novell SMS supports backing up and restoring of NSS, Traditional, and DOS file systems. It also supports higher-level data such as the data in GroupWise and eDirectory. For information, see the OES 11 SP3: Storage Management Services Administration Guide for Linux. |
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Back up and restore data to a variety of storage media: The ability to back up and restore data to multiple possible storage media. |
Novell SMS supports tape drives and tape libraries in addition to other storage media devices such as direct-attached disks, network drives, CDs, and DVDs. These options provide the ability to create a backup onto media other than tape, if desired, or as a fault-tolerant alternative in the event of a tape drive failure. For information, see the OES 11 SP3: Storage Management Services Administration Guide for Linux. |
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Scheduled backup: The ability to schedule and manage backup jobs. |
Novell SMS provides the infrastructure for third-party backup/restore applications to schedule jobs and manage them. Scheduling management makes it easy to handle tape rotation methods and media management computations. For example, scheduling management features are present in Veritas Backup Exec, SyncSort Backup Express, Computer Associates BrightStore, and many others. For information, see the OES 11 SP3: Storage Management Services Administration Guide for Linux. |
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Management alerts: The ability to send out a notification if the backup process fails. |
Novell SMS provides the infrastructure for third-party backup/restore applications to alert administrators or management utilities in the event that the backup process fails. For information, see the OES 11 SP3: Storage Management Services Administration Guide for Linux. |
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Remote backup: The ability to back up a remote system’s data. |
Novell SMS includes an RPC mechanism for remote backup. Most third-party backup/restore applications leverage this mechanism. For information, see the OES 11 SP3: Storage Management Services Administration Guide for Linux. |
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Online or database catalog: The ability to create an online or database catalog of the backed-up data. |
Novell SMS provides the infrastructure for third-party backup/restore applications to create an online or database catalog. The vendor software solution determines whether the catalog is stored on the backup media, or whether it is created dynamically whenever you want to access the media. For information, see the OES 11 SP3: Storage Management Services Administration Guide for Linux. |
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Backup strategies: The ability to implement a variety of backup strategies. |
Novell SMS provides the infrastructure for third-party backup/restore applications to implement a variety of backup strategies, including normal, incremental, differential, copy, and daily. Backup strategies are made easier with the SMS TSA being enabled to utilize the NSS Event File List (EFL). Backup software can use the file system journals to track which files have changed since the last backup. A change journal can track changes in file content, file or directory name, and file or directory permissions. For information, see the OES 11 SP3: Storage Management Services Administration Guide for Linux. |