During the ancient times of Network Data Management Protocol (NDMP), each vendor had to send your backup data in a proprietary format that locked you into that specific solution. You would also periodically have to backup the same repetitive data in full over again even if that data did not change. Many backup administrators still struggle with protecting legions of NAS data; some struggle due to limited IT budgets, and others may suffer from the comfort of familiarity. Regardless of the source of conformity, it immobilizes your critical data and prevents it from achieving the fluidity of cloud data management.

Well, times have changed, and as you know, we are living in a digital world. A world where protecting petabytes of data and billions of files are commonplace, and backup administrators need to arm themselves with a simple approach to protecting NAS data.

Here are seven ways to rise above the challenge of backing up billions of NAS files and how Rubrik Alta 4.1 NAS filesets are the perfect weapon for your conquest.

  1. Educate yourself on scale-out platforms. In the book The Art of War, Sun Tzu wisely pens that “the greatest victory is that which requires no battle.” In one word, this means that you need to — plan. The founding engineers of Rubrik dedicated a tremendous amount of time planning a scalable and robust architecture to accomplish numerous feats, including protecting billions of NAS files. So, have no fear, your plan is here; Rubrik already has several customers protecting billions of NAS files and enjoying the full data management capabilities of the Rubrik platform.
  2. Do not use NDMP. Legacy times, legacy approach. Modern times, modern approach. Do you honestly need a 20-year old management protocol that locks your data into a proprietary format and makes recovery difficult? Rubrik stores your data in its native format, thus making your data instantly recoverable and significantly reducing your Recovery Time Objectives (RTO).
  3. Do use “incremental forever.” Have you ever wondered why periodic “full backups” are needed? Full backups appeared due to a legitimate lack of trust of legacy architectures. This type of blind faith requires bloated IT budgets and over utilizes your network bandwidth, consumes more of your secondary storage, and increases your RTOs. End of story. No need to worry about any of this as Rubrik uses incremental forever. This approach eliminates the need for repeated full backups while reducing your backup windows, providing granular restore points, and restoring your trust in a solution that delivers.
  4. Demand exceptional file reporting. When backing up NAS data, permission errors on specific folders often add unnecessary scan time and excessive logging. How annoying is it when the same error inundates your logs? It becomes challenging to drill-in on real problems vs. less critical alerts, adding to your valuable troubleshooting time. One way to tackle troublesome files missed by the backup application due to the lack of permissions is to capture a list in an easily downloadable CSV file without leaving your UI. Rubrik checks the box in this category.
  5. Utilize granular search and recovery. Have you ever tried restoring a single file of your NAS data from tape? It can be pure agony. Most organizations have written Service Level Agreements (SLA) based on IT and Business Units shaking hands on how frequently to protect and retain their data. Granular file search and recovery is achieved all in a few mouse clicks, providing a powerful way for you to restore your NAS backups through Rubrik’s universal fileset technology. Remember, the metadata holds the key that unlocks the potential of your data’s capabilities.
  6. Backup fast. As the adage goes, “Time is money and money is time.” The faster you can complete your backups, the more time you will have to dedicate to business objectives and costs savings in your IT budget. Rubrik has the intelligence to subdivide incoming datasets into 100 GB target partition sizes. Partitioning filesets into chunks provides increased ingest performance as the workload distributes across all available nodes in the cluster.
  7. Recover faster. What do you gain if your backups are fast, yet your recovery is slow? The recovery balancing act consists of two components: performance and recoverability. Rubrik utilizes multiple parallel partitions to provide fast restores and a simple recovery method through leveraging universal fileset technology via our HTML5-based interface.

Want to learn more? Read Andrew Miller’s blog, The Interesting Challenge of Backing Up NAS. Or check out the below video with Nancy Wang (Product Manager) and Thomas Chang (Engineering Director) on Native NAS Protection at Infinite Scale.

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