hardware Intellisnap with arrays

Thanks Anwar.

So, this explains why I can see nothing in the list snap window.

I was challenged as there was a demonstration by the other competitor software company which is coloured green, and they had shown that it was effectively possible to perform a list, browse and data recovery of array-created snapshots even when they were not initiated by the backup product.

This is a handful, though in ‘manual mode’ argument, especially when you’ve been encrypted and want to try to recover anything from your array.

I was then surprised that if they were able to do it, why wasn’t it possible in Commvault then ?

Is this in the roadmap, then ?

Laurent.

Hi @Mike Struening 

Any inputs here?

You would potentially know better than me, @R Anwar 

Editing slightly, I checked with support; we do not have this option.  If the CSDB is not aware, we can’t browse the snap.

I doubt that would be the case - We have very different data management philosophies vs team green. In principle it may sounds like a good idea to have your backup product be able to manipulate your production snapshots, but without having all the details on who what and why those snapshots were created you could get in to trouble pretty easily, especially if you are modify the snapshot which could be considered a loss of data.

Of course, that may not the case in your scenario where you might know everything about everything, but using the native vendor tools or the application that initiated the snapshot to manage it is our best practice. For us management of the snap is not so much the primary objective, its management of the data contained within the snap which is why we try to abstract that layer as much as possible and focus less on the snap itself, and more on the job and the surrounding policies that govern the data contained within.

Anyway, off my soap box! I’ll take off my philosophical hat now and resume regular programming 

All great info here. Makes me wonder what the use case would be in this scenario. From what I have experienced, in general we would want the backup solution to keep track of the snapshots for the better manageability and less point in time checks and adjusts in terms of old snaps etc.

From what I read, it looks like you would require an API to be installed on an additional machine to perform such a function.

If you have Commvault performing the backups, ideally you should already have the required MAs and Arrays configured as well as the proper workflows, reports and aging mechanism to clean up old snaps based on retention.

I might be over thinking this, but would be interesting to really see what the real use case would be in this case since in my mind the more I can see and manage within my CV interface the better. Centralized and simple.

Hi there and thanks for the discussions / feedback / questions !

Well, the use case that was shown to my company by the green team was that they were able to ‘restore’ data from a hardware snapshot that was initiated not by the backup software itself, but by the array itself.

This is, in daily operations, completely useless, as we can have Commvault initating  (almost) whatever we want on the storage array, and perform the operations we would like, through a centralized and user-friendly interface.

But, when you, still as an example, would have your backup storage encrypted after a cyberattack, and your primary ‘live’ production storage encrypted, you would be happy to be able to ‘manually’ browse your array-initiated hardware snapshots with your preferred backup software (Commvault, no doubt about it ), to recover part of data that was encrypted/lost, instead of reverting the whole snapshot. Yes, if you store VMs on them, maybe some were affected, maybe some not. So reverting all the snapshot is unwanted, if you get my point.

On some storage arrays, the more snapshots you take, the more storage ressources are used, whether they are CPUs or just capacity itself. Depending on their licensing, you could find yourself out of resources because of such activity.

So I thought it would also be a good opportunity to balance between array-initiated snapshots and commvault-initiated snapshots, to reduce the global impact /storage consuption. 

I clicked on ‘Best answer’ instead of ‘Like’ button, sorry for that.. 

Laurent.

I unchecked the Best Answer button for you 

I concur with what the great @Damian Andre said about the roadmap.  It could be dangerous for us to manipulate snaps created by other processes (heck, imagine if team green manipulated ones we created?), though I can see your use case of “this snap is all we have left and we want CV to restore from it”.

With that said, there’s probably better ways to protect against ransomware, though your idea is clever!

Thanks @Mike Struening !

I totally agree with you and @Damian Andre on this topic, and yes it could be too dangerous to manipulate them.

And you understood well , this would be some kind of last chance to recover data. 

Maybe some kind of MediaExplorer-like tool to browse, try to see what’s inside, and then, use the powerful Intellisnap features to get a snap of it, mount it, browse, recover, or some other things coming out of my head now , with the collaboration of the hardware vendor, of course.

Sounds like a feature that could have amazing uses, and equally dangerous ones 

Yes you’re right, I agree, as for other expert tools, it would require to be used only by deep knowledged experts people in very exceptional situations. 

Thanks for this discussion, I’ll mark it as answered. 

I think it could be handful later for some people wondering about this feature. 

Why not use the tools provided by the array? 

Tools (admin consoles?) provided by the array most of the time only provide LUN-level recovery, not somehow the granular recovery that Commvault provides.

Like on a LUN, you could have several VMs hosted, and you would only require to recover a VM or part of it only. If you revert from this snap, then you revert the whole LUN, including all other VMs.

But, I am not aware of such. I have only seen LUN-level admin products.