Zmanda in the News
Introduction
Amanda is the world's most popular open source backup and recovery software. Amanda allows system administrators to set up a single server to back up multiple hosts to a tape- or disk-based storage system over the network. It uses native dump and/or GNU tar facilities and can back up a large number of workstations or servers running various versions of Linux, Unix, Mac OS-X or Microsoft Windows operating systems.
On March 23rd, 2006, the Amanda team released a major version (2.5) of the software. Overall the focus of the release is on security of the backup process & backed up data, scalability of the backup process and ease of installation & configuration of Amanda.
New features in Amanda 2.5
Security:
Recently security of the backup process has been a hotly discussed topic. Encryption of data across the network as well as while being stored on backup media is critical for privacy concerns and compliance requirements. New security features in Amanda 2.5 help administrators to address these issues.
Data transport security and backup client authentication: Amanda 2.5 brings additional support for Kerberos 4/5 and OpenSSH. This allows Amanda to protect the transfer of data between clients and backup server with strong authentication- and authorization-mechanisms. The new release also features an abstracted secure communication API that will allow developers to easily add different communication plugins between backup server and client.
Data storage security:
To protect data on the backup media itself, Amanda 2.5 allows to encrypt backups with Symmetric or Asymmetric encryption algorithms (using either aespipe or gpg). This encryption can be done on the server or the client (depending on available CPU power). It is also possible to use custom encryption utilities.
The flexibility of the security configurations allows Amanda to fit into the security policies and processes of IT organisations.
Scalability and Optimizing Resource Usage:
Amanda 2.5 makes it significantly easier to backup large chunks of data, by adding following two features:
Dump images spanning multiple media volumes:
This major step forward alleviates Amanda's most significant limitation. The size of the backed up images is no longer restricted to a single media volume but may now span over several volumes. This gets rid of the need of the administrator to artificially segment their data into parts which can fit into a single media volume (as required in prior versions of Amanda).
Data Compression:
Efficient data compression methodology can significantly improve resource usage and performance of a backup solution. Amanda 2.5 greatly enhances system administrators' ability to compress backup data. Now it is possible to use custom compression tools with Amanda. Administrators can even specify different tools for different parts of their environment. This allows the use of the most efficient compression algorithms for the particular type of data being backed up, e.g. images, binaries, text files etc.
Ease of Installation and Configuration:
Auto tape labeling:
This optional feature removes one historical hassle of configuring Amanda: Labeling volumes. Especially useful with disk-based backup, this feature can save considerable setup time.
Phased upgrade:
This release is compatible with the earlier Amanda release (2.4.5). This allows Amanda users to migrate the Amanda backup server to 2.5 without migrating Amanda clients (i.e. systems being protected) to 2.5. Amanda has a significant installed base, so this phased upgrade would help system administrators to upgrade the existing installations.
Pre-packaged binaries:
Amanda is now available as pre-packaged binaries for a wide variety of Linux distributions: Downloads.
These packages enable users to install the new version without having to compile from scratch. They also ensure consistency between the server and the clients. There are two packages (in form of RPMs) for Amanda:
- The amanda-backup_server RPM should be installed on Amanda backup servers. It contains the Amanda server and the client.
- The amanda-backup_client RPM should be installed on Amanda clients - machines to be protected.
These RPMs automate many tasks in Amanda configuration that were previously done by hand. A user called "amandabackup" is automatically created, which is used by Amanda processes and files. Various configuration files and directories are automatically created as well.
Quality of Code
Open source software is always under close scrutiny, which results in its better quality. Amanda developers made sure that the code released as part of Amanda 2.5 had zero outstanding bugs as found by automated bug detection tool provided by Coverity (scan.coverity.com).
Other developments and upcoming features
The Amanda project recently announced its wiki and forums. These enable easy collaboration among developers and system administrators.
While the Amanda development team deserves to take a short breather after a hectic period resulting in this major release, they have already started working on the most important items on the Amanda Wishlist.
In summary, the Amanda development team has achieved a significant milestone by delivering Amanda 2.5. System administrators looking for an effective, simple and secure network based backup solution should give it a shot.
