USING MULTIPLE STREAMS WITH NETWORK DATA MANAGEMENT PROTOCOL TO IMPROVE PERFORMANCE AND GRANULARITY OF BACKUP AND RESTORE OPERATIONS FROM/TO A FILE SERVER

摘要

Multiple substantially concurrent data streams with NDMP protocol improve robustness, performance, and granularity of backup and restore operations from/to a filer. NDMP data streams are initially allocated based on inventorying the root level of each filer volume. A best effort to balance the multiple NDMP data streams allocates them based on data amounts used in each volume. Orphaned files are also collected and backed up. Subsequent full backup jobs leverage a proprietary index generated in preceding full backup jobs to obtain better performance and to better balance the NDMP data streams by creating substantially co-equal groupings of source data. The index comprises granular information which is not available from querying the filer. The size of each individual backup copy from a preceding full backup job and/or the size of subtending subdirectories or individual backed up files therein is used by later backup jobs to fine tune NDMP data stream allocation.