N7000 near-line storage capabilities
The N7000 is well suited for near-line
storage configurations. An N7000 sys
tem populated with Fibre Channel disk
drives that backs up to another
N series system populated with SATA
disk drives offers disk-to-disk backup
capabilities that are designed to help
you fill the price/performance gap
between fast but costly primary storage
and less-costly but slow archival (tape
and optical) storage. Utilizing SATA disk
drive technology, you could achieve
near-primary storage performance at
near-tape storage costs. A disk-based,
secondary storage device for enterprise
applications, N7000 disk-to-disk envi
ronments are designed to complement
and dramatically improve existing tape
backup, archiving and data protection
schemes. They do so by inserting eco
nomical and simple-to-use disk-based
storage between application storage
and tape libraries in a three-tier
storage architecture.
This arrangement is designed to pro
vide economical storage and rapid
disk-based access to reference data to
help address business and regulatory
requirements. It can serve as a key
component in an information lifecycle
management process by storing less-
critical data on a device whose cost
and performance stand between pri
mary and tape storage.
Combined with SnapVault®, the N7000
disk-to-disk backup environments are
designed to serve as a robust and fully
integrated appliance that makes back
ing up and restoring data rapid and reli
able. Backing up directly to an N7000
system in a near-line storage configura
tion and then to tape can help your
organization enhance data protection
management, improve primary storage
and tape library performance, and
reduce backup resource requirements
and costs. Two N series systems oper
ating in a disk-to-disk backup scenario
are designed to be faster and to con
sume less application-server CPU pro
cessing power than direct backup to
tape. SnapVault software can be used
to help reduce network bandwidth con
sumption by supporting incremental
block transfers to backup data across a
LAN or WAN. SnapMirror® software,
which replicates data at high speeds
over a LAN or a WAN, is designed to
provide high data availability and
fast recovery for mission-critical
applications.
IBM N series systems using
NearStore® software can use the
Advanced Single Instance Storage
(A-SIS) software feature for better stor
age utilization. A-SIS software enables
N series systems to deduplicate stored
data at the block level in order to con
serve physical disk space when making
disk-to-disk copies of primary data.
Traditionally when copies of volumes
are created, every duplicate data string
is also copied, resulting in an inefficient
use for secondary storage. A-SIS dedu
plication helps eliminate this inefficiency.
Support for data retention through non
erasable, non-rewriteable security
capabilities
The N7000 offers multiple capabilities in
the area of data retention. It can serve
as a high-performance device for stor
ing mission-critical production data and
as a data-retention system by running
SnapLock® software. The N7000 with
SnapLock software is designed to
deliver high-performance and high-
security data permanence to disk-
based nearline and primary N series
storage. An optional feature of the
proven Data ONTAP operating system,
SnapLock software supports the accu
racy, integrity and security of data.
