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Access "Snapshots stymied in virtual world"

Published: 20 Oct 2012
Backup overhaul: From a mainframe to an open-systems environment

This article is part of the Vol. 6 No. 2 April 2007 issue of Backup overhaul: From a mainframe to an open-systems environment

Backup technology hasn't quite caught up with virtualization, particularly in the NAS world where physical filers must be backed up individually. To address this shortcoming, vendors are looking at ways to perform file-level heterogeneous snapshots at the logical layer. But it may be a long time before that dream comes to fruition. Storage vendors have offered this capability at the block level for some time. IBM, for example, can create a virtual volume across multiple heterogeneous storage systems and then create snapshots of that volume through its System Storage SAN Volume Controller, available since 2003. Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) has been doing the same thing at both the block and file level since 2004 with its Universal Volume Manager (UVM), which creates virtual volumes of heterogeneous systems attached to its TagmaStore Universal Storage Platform. Snapshots can then be performed using its ShadowImage In-System Replication Software. It's more complicated at the file level. A federated snapshot across filers involving multiple protocols and/or ... Access >>>

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