Extensible NetApp: Thinking outside of the box

Using Protection Manager, SnapDrive for Windows and SnapManager for Exchange

In my previous post I described at a high level the power of the recently released SnapManager, SnapDrive and Protection Manager products.

To give you a flavor for the workflow of the tools let me walk you through the process of how they are used. *

First the storage architect or disk to disk backup architect defines a set of policies that can be used using Protection Manager.

To create a new policy the storage architect first selects one of the predefined policies

and then modifies that policy to meet the specific requirements of his organization.

Now the policy is ready to be used by an Exchange administrator.

Before you can use SnapManager for Exchange you need to configure SnapDrive for Windows to talk to a DFM Server that has Protection Manager license.

To use the policy the Exchange administrator brings up SnapManager for Exchange

and where before he could only configure local Snapshot and SnapMirror schedules, now the administrator has additional data protection policies that include disk-to-disk backup.

The Exchange administrator  then simply assigns policies to Exchange storage groups. As each policy gets assigned to a storage group, SnapManager for Exchange through SnapDrive for Windows creates a new dataset  in Protection Manager that contains the LUNs that contain the Exchange storage group.

Each dataset that is created does not, however, have any secondary storage resources assigned to it. That has to be done by the storage administrator.

To assign the physical resources, the storage architect would use Protection Manager to find the new datasets. This is made easy by Protection Manager, because the datasets would appear as a dataset that was out of conformance with respect to the specified policy.

The storage architect then assigns the right resource pool to the storage group. Once that is done, Protection Manager will  then automatically create the backup relationships, run the schedules, and configure any additional secondary storage objects.

Once that is done the Exchange storage group is protected.

* For more info on datasets, policies and resource pools check this paper we published in LISA 2007.

* For more info on how SnapManager and SnapDrive work check this article from Tech ONTAP.

Why are we integrating SnapManager for Exchange, SnapDrive for Windows, and Protection Manager?

SnapDrive for Windows 6.0 and Protection Manager, part of the DFM 3.7 release, and SnapManager for Exchange 5.0  are the first tangible artifacts that demonstrate the power of NetApp's Integrated Data Management Vision.

Three years ago in a meeting at NetApp, a bunch of us had the radical idea that if you could enable server and application administrators to manage their own data you could unlock tremendous amounts of productivity by eliminating processes and procedures in the data center that existed to overcome limitations in storage management systems. 

From that observation came two significant technological breakthroughs. The first was the introduction of our policy based management infrastructure as part of the Protection Manager product and the second is the integration of our very successful SnapDrive for Windows and SnapManager for Exchange products with that policy based infrastructure.

Superficially Protection Manager is a GUI for managing NetApp replication. But that, as they say, completely misses the point. If you think of Protection Manager as just a GUI, then you'll probably wonder why we ever bothered with the integration at all. And you would be right in wondering.

Protection Manager, in reality, is a policy automation layer coupled with a very capable delegation model. These two technologies allow storage architects to define policies for how storage should be used and in parallel allow other people to create storage based on those very same policies. In effect, the storage architect does the hard work of figuring out how he wants people to use his storage once, and leaves the relatively simple task of provisioning storage to other people secure in the knowledge that they can not make a mistake.