A NDMP Based Block Level Backup And Data Management Method And Its Implementation

With the steady increasing of data importance, data protection becomes vital to maintain business continuity. But globalization causes the backup window shrunk. How to backup data efficiently and effectively is one of the most urgent questions today. At the same time, the rocketing backup data size cause the availability and stability of backup system itself decreasing. How to manage such a huge data resources and how to offer reliable service has become one big change of backup system itself.NDMP is a wildly used protocol for file system backup and recovery. This paper presents an extension for NDMP to support Block-Level-Incremental backup (BLI). Compared with file system backup, BLI can achieve higher backup performance and less space occupation. This paper also presents a data-merge and data-extract extension for NDMP. By these extensions, it is possible to carry on merge-recovery and rollback-recovery method to achieve higher recovery performance. Further more, data integration, based on data-merge technology, is the foundation of data management.At last, this paper presents a Data-Protection-Policy (DPP), based on these extensions of NDMP. Compared with traditional backup policy, DPP turns users' concern from backup to recovery, and makes it easier to use. It applies incremental-only backup method to reduce the total size of backup data, and then applies data-merge technology to manage backup data, producing any data needed. Backup policy applies multi-copy to achieve high availability, but multi-copy occupies too much space. DPP presents a technology called Time-Piece-Overlap, which can achieve higher availability, while decreasing space cost.All the technologies mentioned above have been realized and tested in Blue Whale Backup System.