Data backup is no longer difficult, illustrate the three major networking methods to protect your digital life
The backup software provides a variety of networking methods, and users can choose according to the existing network environment. There are two common modes: LAN Base and LAN Free, but they may affect the performance of service servers. On the other hand, the server free mode does not transmit data through the service server, which reduces the impact on the business. In addition, backup software usually has a deduplication and compression function to reduce the amount of backup data transmitted in the network and reduce the network load.
LAN Base networking architecture
In a LAN backup network, all servers that need to be backed up only need to install the backup client (iDA). At the other end of the network, the Media Server (MA) needs to be connected to the backup storage media. During the backup process, all the data to be backed up is transmitted to the media server over the network, and the media server stores the data in the backup media.
The disadvantages of LAN are also obvious, as it is highly dependent on network transmission resources and backup server resources, and is prone to congestion. But it has the lowest cost to build.
LAN Free Networking Architecture
LAN Free is an efficient backup architecture designed to reduce the strain on local area networks (LANs) and business servers on backup tasks. With the introduction of a dedicated storage area network (SAN), data transfer is done directly between storage devices, bypassing the traditional LAN entirely, dramatically improving backup efficiency and system performance.
Compared with LAN backup, LAN-free backup frees up network resources more efficiently and reduces the burden on backup servers. However, its impact on the production system is still relatively large.
If data can be transferred directly from the source to the backup media without going through the production system, wouldn't the problems faced by LAN-free backup be solved? It is based on this thinking that Server-free backup technology came into being.
Server-free networking architecture
In server-free backups, we take advantage of the snapshot capabilities of the storage array. To do this, create a snapshot of the production data and map it to a backup server, which then mounts the snapshot and copies the data to backup media. Because snapshots are created quickly, take up little to no extra time, and do not affect running production systems, it is named Server-free backup.
Server-free backup occupies the least server resources, but the relative cost is very high.
summary
From the perspective of data volume: LAN backup data volume is the smallest; The amount of LAN-free backup data is slightly larger; Server-free backup, on the other hand, is able to back up a large amount of data in a short period of time.
The three backup architectures, LAN, LAN-Free, and Server-Free, have their own advantages and disadvantages, and users can choose the most suitable solution based on their needs. Currently, LAN is the most mature backup technology. With the advancement of SAN technology, LAN-Free has also become very mature, and it is more popular because it centralizes backup management, consumes fewer server resources, and costs less than Server-Free. Server-Free is a tool that most users rarely choose to back up their data due to its high cost.