Before I begin, I wanted to introduce myself as many may not know me as I am relatively new to the NetApp ONTAP® family. My name is Tony (@storagetechtony on X, StorageTechTony on Discord, and ansley_tj here in the NetApp® Community), and I am what NetApp refers to as a TME, or a Technical Marketing Engineer. My role within NetApp is to act as a customer advocate focusing on one or more NetApp technologies. I see the TME role as a two-sided coin:
- I work with engineering and field technical teams to help bridge the gap between our customers’ requirements and what we create as products for NetApp.
- I own, develop, and maintain a broad range of outward-bound technical collateral that helps our customers and partners to better understand and utilize ONTAP within their data infrastructure.
My focused area of responsibility is data protection…specifically, I have responsibility for SnapMirror® asynchronous and synchronous and those products that rely on those two technologies such as our data mobility tool (vserver migrate) and some of you may already have received responses from me related to specific questions about SnapMirror functionality.
Introduction
For many of you, NetApp ONTAP® is very familiar. You have been eating, sleeping, and breathing ONTAP data management for years. For others, you may be new to the ONTAP world, so I wanted to start a series of tutorial blogs where I can introduce and discuss various topics related to data protection for ONTAP.
For this first entry, I think a quick overview of data protection with ONTAP might be appropriate and we will review what data protection (DP) is, what options you have for DP solutions within ONTAP, and how to decide which is the right DP solution for your needs. With that, let’s get started!
What is Data Protection?
There are a lot of definitions for the term Data Protection. DP could cover everything from traditional data backups to ransomware protections. For our purposes, we will focus on DP as a function of loss prevention and accessibility. In fact, if you search the web for a definition of data protection, you will get something like this:
--Data protection safeguards information from loss by using backup and recovery processes.
OK…that seems simple enough. The challenge is how you do you backup and recover your data? What are the tools available to do this and how do those tools provide an advantage over other tools? For NetApp ONTAP(r), that is a pretty simple answer…use NetApp ONTAP native tools. ONTAP tools can most efficiently perform data protection of data stored in ONTAP systems. This includes supporting the backup and recovery of data that has been compacted, compressed, encrypted, etc. while maintaining those storage efficiencies within the backup. This means your backup consumes less space and can be moved faster than most 3rd party solutions.
So, what are those tools and how do you decide which to use? Let’s explore these questions and see if we can help you decide which to use.
When planning a data protection solution, we must think about the “big picture.” A comprehensive plan needs to be created and that plan needs to account for a broad spectrum of possible failure scenarios. Data availability can be impacted by anything from a failed network adapter or power supply in a single storage device, malicious internal or external “bad actors” that may have inside access to the data (see Fighting Ransomware: Part One – The History and Cost or NetApp’s data-centric security solutions for today’s top cyberthreats for more background), or it could be a massive earthquake, hurricane, or other natural disasters (Figure 1). We need to protect data locally as well as ensure that our data is stored remotely. DP can take the form of hardware redundancy, such as RAID and redundant power sources, network adapters, and such; as well as data redundancy using data replication.
Figure 1: Data protection must account for a broad spectrum of attack vectors
In addition, we need to consider the following questions:
- How much data can I afford to lose?
- How quickly can I restore my data?
- How do I get my applications operational again as quickly as possible?
For this discussion, we are going to focus on the first two questions as the third is really dependent on the application and is much too broad a topic.
The first question is what we call the recovery point objective (RPO). At first glance, the obvious answer to that question is “none.” Of course, I don’t want to lose any data – my data is critical to my business’ success, but in today’s world of limited budgets, we simply may not be able to afford to have a “zero RPO” solution. These types of DP tend to be expensive, so answering this question really comes down to a tradeoff between cost and data loss.
The second question is what we call the recovery time objective (RTO). This describes how quickly I can get my data back online for my applications to use. Again, a “zero RTO” solution would be ideal, but as with the RPO discussion, we have to balance cost and recovery time. In context to the past, RTO capabilities of modern storage solutions are light-years better. Not too long ago, data was backed up to physical tape devices, that might have been stored off-site. The result of this was recovery times could be on the order of days…not the minutes or seconds we can achieve today.
Data Protection within NetApp ONTAP
Data protection for NetApp ONTAP comes in the form of SnapMirror®. SnapMirror is probably the first, and most well-known data protection solution in the industry…just ask our competitors 😀. Regardless of your desired RPO or RTO, regardless of the type of data you are trying to protect, and regardless of the source and destination storage locations, SnapMirror is your one-stop solution for data protection for ONTAP. Depending on the data type, SnapMirror can provide zero RPO/RTO protection or simply provide backup to disk archival solutions whether on-premises or in the cloud (Figure 2). SnapMirror is used for real-time data protection supporting RPO=0/RTO=0, disaster recovery where RPO>0/RTO>0, and backup and recovery for “forever incremental” empowers you with the most efficient archival solution available.
Figure 2: SnapMirror provides data protection everywhere your data lives
SnapMirror removes the need to pick and choose from different tools depending on your RPO/RTO requirements because SnapMirror is the data protection tool you will use regardless of your RPO/RTO requirements for ONTAP hosted data.
What could be easier?
Over the next several weeks, months…maybe even years 😮, I will be breaking down SnapMirror functionality. First, starting with a basic history and understanding of how SnapMirror works, then talking about how it supports different RPO requirements, talking about different data formats, and hopefully, with the help of some of my cloud-focused colleagues, talk about the different cloud platforms. As I progress, I will update this introduction with links to all of the subsequent blog posts to provide an active index for future access.
I hope you find these discussions valuable. I will depend on your help along the way through your comments and guidance. If there is an area of SnapMirror that you want to learn more about, let me know. That being said, I will let you know that I am not a programmer. While I do plan on highlighting the REST API as a tool, I am not versed in the arcana that is REST development.
OK…I have rambled enough for one blog entry. 😄
Stay tuned.