A NAS estate of NetApp filers must be protected to the new Data Dom…

Question

A NAS estate of NetApp filers must be protected to the new Data Domain. Security rules forbid installing backup agents on the filers, and monitoring shows filer CPU already peaks high in business hours, so management wants no file-level backup reads consuming filer resources. How should this backup connectivity be set up?

Accepted Answer

Use NDMP, which lets the filer stream its own backup directly to the Data Domain while the backup application merely schedules and orchestrates the job, requiring no agent in the filer's host environment and no file-level crawl through a media server. — Filer backup has its own dedicated lane, and it's called NDMP. It's the one protocol where the storage system talks appliance-to-appliance and the backup server just conducts the traffic, no agents, no file-by-file crawl that would cook your filer's CPU. Reaching for a generic mount or a tape device here just recreates the exact problem you're trying to avoid.

Answer

Export the volumes over NFS to the media servers and back up by file copy, since NDMP would require an agent on the filer anyway and the copy path avoids the protocol entirely.

Answer

Present a virtual tape library over fibre channel so the filers can back themselves up directly to tape devices without any intermediary at all.

Answer

Configure the filers as Boost clients by installing the Boost library in user mode on each filer, since source-side deduplication is the only architecture that spares the filer's CPU.

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