Cobalt Iron Inc. announced the launch of Compass NAS Protector, a new
set of features in its Cobalt Iron Compass enterprise SaaS
backup platform. Intended to aid enterprise NAS and backup
administrators, Compass NAS Protector speeds up backups, simplifies
management of NAS data, and improves and consolidates backup operations.
Backup and recovery of network-attached storage (NAS) systems are
often-neglected areas of IT operations. In addition, while NAS usage is
prevalent and is projected to keep growing, there have been few
improvements in the past decade or two in the techniques for protecting
and restoring NAS data.
The most commonly used approaches for NAS data protection are file-level
backup, NAS replication, and Network Data Management Protocol (NDMP)
backup. These techniques have glaring disadvantages. Traditional
file-level backup gets bogged down while scanning and protecting very
large NAS environments. NAS replication and NDMP techniques limit
recovery flexibility, lose opportunities for policy-based data
management, add one-off operational complexities, and tend to increase
costs.
The new Compass NAS Protector provides a competitive advantage over
aging NAS protection techniques in use today. It allows a new, optimized
approach to protecting NAS data that:
-
Accelerates NAS file identification and NAS data backups.
-
Enables recovery flexibility, such as restoring to different device types and locations.
-
Provides policy-based management of NAS data at the file/object level.
-
Simplifies NAS backup operations and consolidates them with the rest of enterprise data protection.
-
Provides a single data protection solution for traditional NAS filers and cloud NAS services.
-
Employs efficient data-reduction techniques on NAS data, such as incremental forever backups, deduplication, and compression.
Compass NAS Protector is an innovative technology for identifying new,
changed, and deleted NAS files compared with the Compass inventory.
Proprietary scanning and identification processes optimize parallelism
in NAS share/export scanning. Enhanced data-movement processing enables
high-speed, parallel backup and archiving. And the technology ensures
NAS device independence to consistently protect physical, virtual, and
cloud NAS share/export resources.
Compass NAS Protector is automatically available to existing and new Compass users at no additional cost.
"Protection of NAS data is typically inefficient and cumbersome,
especially for very large NAS systems," said Rob Marett, chief
technology officer at Cobalt Iron. "The Compass NAS Protector introduces
proprietary NAS scanning and identification processes that optimize NAS
data protection - something you won't find with other backup products.
Optimizing NAS backups is an example of Cobalt Iron's strategy to
improve every aspect of the backup and restore experience."