IBM N7000 - Manual (Page 4)

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.