Kudos from Curtis - NetApp Protection Manager and Policy Management

Sometimes you're so deep into the planning, development and implementation of products that you don't get enough opportunity to see the noticeable impact those products will have on your customers and the industry.

I was delighted to see the recent blog post from W. Curtis Preston, Mr Backup to you and me - http://www.backupcentral.com/content/view/193/47/ . His blog provides a glowing testimony of how Protection Manager dramatically changes the approach to backup and replication management.

One of our design criteria was how to change the management of scale. This required a fundamentally different approach and we created Policy-based Management. Central to that is the ability to separate the business logic (the policies) from the implementation (eg use of SnapMirror). It also then grouped and pooled objects into Datasets and Resource Pools so that you can manage at scale - for an overview see the Integrated Data Management overview paper. http://media.netapp.com/documents/IDMOVERVIEWPAPER.pdf and also the Protection Manager overview by Laura Dubois http://media.netapp.com/documents/ar1064.pdf 

One follow up to Mr Backup's post - the application integration into Protection Manager is well under way. The first delivery was our recent (May 2008) release of SnapManager for Exchange which integrates into Protection Manager. This allows you to directly select and manager policy assignment from the SnapManager interface while delivering complete central administration of policies, monitoring and reporting from Protection Manager. We are adding SnapManager for SQLServer and SnapManager for Oracle support by the end of this calendar year.

 

Thanks Curtis for your note and thanks to the NetApp engineering team for the progress we have made so far...more please.

Comments

[Fitness Freak]

Planning, Development and Implementation of products is best done by NetApp Protection Manager and each has its own Policy Management.

[Peak]

[...]Thanks Curtis for your note and thanks to the NetApp engineering team for the progress we have made so far...more please.[...]