Dell DL1000 User Manual

Also see for DL1000: Owner's manual Deployment guide

Contents

Dell DL1000 User Manual Manual pdf 9 page image

Dell DL1000 Smart AgentThe Smart Agent is installed on the core-protected machine. The Smart Agent tracks the changed blockson the disk volume and then snaps an image of the changed blocks at a predefined interval of protection.The incremental block-level snapshots’ forever approach prevents repeated copying of the same datafrom the protected machine to the Core.After the agent is configured, it uses smart technology to track the changed blocks on the protected diskvolumes. When the snapshot is ready, it is rapidly transferred to the Core using intelligent multi-threaded,socket-based connections.Snapshot processYour DL1000 protection process begins when a base image is transferred from a protected machine tothe Core. In this phase, full copy of the machine is transported across the network under normaloperation, followed by incremental snapshots forever. The DL1000 Agent for Windows uses MicrosoftVolume Shadow copy Service (VSS) to freeze and quiesce application data to disk to capture a file-system-consistent and an application-consistent backup. When a snapshot is created, the VSS writer onthe target server prevents content from being written to the disk. During the process of halting of writingcontent to disk, all disk I/O operations are queued and resume only after the snapshot is complete, whilethe operations in progress will be completed and all open files will be closed. The process of creating ashadow copy does not significantly affect the performance of the production system.Your DL1000 uses Microsoft VSS because it has built-in support for all Windows internal technologiessuch as NTFS, Registry, Active Directory, to flush data to disk before the snapshot. Additionally, otherenterprise applications, such as Microsoft Exchange and SQL, use VSS Writer plug-ins to get notifiedwhen a snapshot is being prepared and when they have to flush their used database pages to disk tobring the database to a consistent transactional state. The captured data is rapidly transferred and storedon the Core.Replication — disaster recovery site or service providerReplication is the process of copying recovery points from an AppAssure core and transmitting them toanother AppAssure core in a separate location for disaster recovery. The process requires a pairedsource-target relationship between two or more cores.The source core copies the recovery points of selected protected machines, and then asynchronouslyand continually transmits the incremental snapshot data to the target core at a remote disaster recoverysite. You can configure outbound replication to a company-owned data center or remote disasterrecovery site (that is, a “self-managed” target core). Or, you can configure outbound replication to athird-party managed service provider (MSP) or cloud provider that hosts off-site backup and disasterrecovery services. When replicating to a third-party target core, you can use built-in work flows that letyou request connections and receive automatic feedback notifications.Replication is managed on a per-protected-machine basis. Any machine (or all machines) protected orreplicated on a source core can be configured to replicate to a target core.Replication is self-optimizing with a unique Read-Match-Write (RMW) algorithm that is tightly coupledwith deduplication. With RMW replication, the source and target replication service matches keys beforetransferring data and then replicates only the compressed, encrypted, deduplicated data across the WAN,resulting in a 10x reduction in bandwidth requirements.9