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DR Series Best Practice Guide

Access Protocols

Access protocols are set on a per container basis when a container is created. In some cases these

cannot be changed. The protocol options are options are as follows:

 CIFS or NFS only

 CIFS and NFS together (although cross protocol support is not supported)

 OST Only, RDS Only, NDMP Only, iSCSI Only

It is possible to add or remove CIFS/NFS access. However, once the container has RDS/OST added it is

not changeable.

Security is set at a container level (Locking down Via IP, Unix/Windows ACLs, etc.)

For CIFS shares it is recommended that the shares are set with the most restrictive ACLs, and further

locked down by the IP or DNS name of machines that are allowed to connect to that container.

For NFS shares, it is recommended that root user be set to nobody and that NFS shares are further

locked down by the IP or DNS name of the machines that are allowed to connect to that container.

Marker Support

Many DMAs add metadata into the backup stream to enable them to find, validate and restore data

they wrote into the file. This metadata makes the data appear unique to dedupe enabled storage. In

order to properly dedupe the data, the markers need to be removed before the stream is processed.

In the DR, markers are set on a container level and are set to auto by default. This allows all known

detected markers to be stripped before the data is processed. In situations where the DMA does not

have markers, or the DMA is known, a slight performance increase can be had by setting the markers

correctly.

If the DMA in use is BackupExec or Netbackup the marker should be set to none. For other DMAs such

as Commvault, TSM, ARCserve or HP Data Protector, the marker type setting should be set to Auto.

The remaining supported DMA’s will be set to it’s matching Marker Type.

Note: Changing the marker type after data is ingested could make the data appear unique,

causing dedupe savings to be adversely impacted until all ingested data with the previous

marker is removed. To avoid this problem, the proper marker should be set on containers from

the start.