Protecting petabytes: Best practices for big data backup

One of the issues created by holding voluminous data sets (also called "big data") in your storage environment is how to protect that data.

Petabyte-size data stores can play havoc with backup windows, and traditional backup is not designed to handle millions of small files. The good news is that not all big data information needs to be backed up in the traditional way.

Nick Kirsch, director of product management for EMC’s Isilon scale-out NAS platform, said it helps to be more intelligent about the data you have when doing big data backups. He advises that, before you consider how to protect your data, you should take a good look at what data needs to be protected. Machine-generated data – report data from a database, for instance – can be reproduced easier than it can be backed up and recovered.

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Scale-out network-attached storage: Options in today’s market

In storage, scale-out systems are becoming a popular option to deal with rapid data growth. File data is growing the fastest, making network-attached storage (NAS) the most popular type of scale-out storage. Clustered NAS systems that fit the “scale-out” tag are targeted at processing heavy applications such as “big data” analytics and large file environments.

Storage vendors differ over the best way to architect a scale-out network-attached storage system, but the largest vendors and many smaller ones have pushed into the market. Most scale-out NAS systems use individual device nodes, which can be commodity servers or proprietary devices. As interest in scale-out systems has increased, well-known storage vendors such as Dell Corp., EMC Corp., Hewlett Packard (HP) Co., Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) and NetApp Inc. have acquired technology to offer their own scale-out NAS products. IBM OEMs NetApp’s technology while it develops its own.

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EMC Isilon aims to make Hadoop storage ready for enterprise

EMC Corp. is tackling Hadoop storage by integrating the open source “big data” analytics framework with EMC Isilon scale-out NAS.

Today, EMC said its Isilon OneFS 6.5 operating system natively supports the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) protocol. The vendor also released EMC Greenplum HD on Isilon. EMC launched Greenplum HD last May, putting Hadoop on its Greenplum data analytics appliance. Now the Greenplum appliance works with Isilon back-end storage.

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