Network Attached Storage devices are rapidly becoming popular with enterprise and small businesses in many industries as an effective, scalable, low-cost storage solution.

Network Attached Storage is a storage device connected to a network that allows storage and retrieval of data from a central location for authorized network users and varied clients. NAS devices are flexible and scale out, meaning that as you need additional storage, you can add to what you have. NAS is like having a private cloud in the office. It’s faster, less expensive and provides all the benefits of a public cloud on site, giving you complete control. NAS is defined as a special kind of file-level data storage server, including storage devices such as disk arrays, CD/DVD drives, tape.

Zmanda helps enterprises achieve NAS backup solutions and objectives - even during major IT outages. IT teams can expect robust NAS cloud backup. Zmanda is a powerful backup and recovery offering for a price less than you would expect.

Unstructured data is growing exponentially, and legacy disaster recovery solutions are unable to keep up. Zmanda offers large scale automated NAS cloud backup that mirror any changes made on OS clients/NAS environments enabling fast, reliable backup and recovery for growing unstructured datasets.

ZCB can store your backups on any Network Attached Storage (NAS) device. It can also back up data that exists on a NAS. Some setup is required. The amandabackup user created by ZCB during installation must have access to the NAS device. The amandabackup user is integral to ZCB operations, and without proper permission, backup and restore operations will fail. Please see  What is the amandabackup user? for more details. 

The same setup is required to restore data from backups on a NAS.

Enterprises use both depending on the use case.

Both solutions can use the same type of hard drives, the same RAID controllers, and even the same quality enclosure. Both solutions can satisfy high availability requirements.

There are two key differences:

1. How the storage is presented to the host; Block or NFS/CFS

2. The underlying network used to access the storage; Ethernet or Fibre Channel (SAN)

"Storage Area Network (SAN)" means block storage over fibre channel. Block storage over Ethernet also exists; the two most common standards are iscsi and FCoE. Block storage appears to the host very much like a local SATA hard drive while NFS/CFS appear as a network share.

Production use: Typically, but not always, Block only allows one host to access the same storage, while NFS/CIFS allow multiple hosts to concurrently read and write to the same storage.

Backup and Restore: Since block storage can only be accessed by one host, that host must run a backup agent to make a daily copy of the data on that storage. All storage must be read and transferred from the storage, through the underlying network, into the host, and then back out of the host to the backup target.

This really becomes a problem in virtual environments because all of this data must be transferred into fewer physical machines supporting numerous virtual machines.

With NAS (NFS/CFS) the backup occurs on the NAS device directly to the backup target; bypassing the host.

Whether you are interested in backing up your data in NAS or SAN, Zmanda can help. Zmanda makes NAS and SAN backups simple, yet powerful enough to comply with rigorous disaster recovery requirements offering reliable protection for massive amounts of data. Network Attached Storage devices also simplify disaster recovery for large quantities of structured/unstructured data.

Amanda is designed to handle large numbers of clients and data, yet is reasonably simple to install and maintain. It scales well up and down, so small configurations, even a single client, are possible. There are many users who back up just a single client that is also the Amanda server. On the other hand, many Amanda users backup hundreds and even thousands of file systems (there could be multiple file systems per protected system) to a large tape library with multiple drives.

To enable IT to test Zmanda on demo environments - we offer a fully licensed version of Zmanda for 14 days. Please fill out our Free Trial form, and our sales team will help you get started.