Isilon Backup with Networker and DD Boost to Data Domain

Quite frequently I am getting asked when we will integrate the DD-boost protocol into Isilon/OneFS for customers who want to backup to an EMC Data Domain system with high degree of deduplication. Although we haven’t got a direct boost integration into OneFS yet, there is a standard way of backing up a OneFS filesystem through DD-boost using a NetWorker Data Service Agent.

In the configuration shown below, we are leveraging NDMP to backup out of the front end of the Isilon storage platform over Ethernet to a NetWorker Storage Node. Depending on the amount of data and number of streams, you can have one or more Isilon nodes sending data and employ one or more NetWorker storage nodes to help facilitate the backup.

NetWorker features something called the Data Service Agent – commonly referred to as DSA – which is able to save or recover data via an NDMP connection between a NetWorker server or storage node and a NAS storage system. DSA essentially puts a “wrapper” around the backup data stream to enable the NetWorker software to write it to a non-NDMP backup device.

 

 

With this capability, NetWorker can then take advantage of Data Domain Boost software integrated at the NetWorker storage node. Parts of the deduplication process can then take place at the NetWorker storage node to increase throughput performance and improve network bandwidth utilization between the storage node and the Data Domain system.

The other advantage of this configuration which leverages the integration of NetWorker with DD Boost is that NetWorker can schedule and have full indexing of Data Domain replication to a second Disaster Recovery target.

In general, if each component shown here – Isilon, the Storage Node, and Data Domain – all have 10 Gigabit Ethernet links, performance of backup and recovery is optimal.  This configuration balances good throughput with the ability to leverage DD Boost integration with NetWorker. An Isilon Backup Accelerator is not required in this case because you don’t need a SAN here.

Side Node: OneFS 8.0 and Networker 9 SP1 do support NDMP Multi Stream. That yields into much faster backups as Networker can parallelize backups in a granular manner. This topic is definitely worth another blog post….

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