In our last conversation, we talked about the new features of Miria 2021 R1, and particularly Snapstor. Geoffrey, can you explain who the major evolution of this version is for and what are its benefits?

Geoffrey Bitard: To give you some context, Miria targets very high-capacity unstructured data storages. We’re talking volumes from 500 TB to hundreds of petabytes or even exabytes of file data.

With Miria for Backup, the target need is business continuity for organizations with huge volumes of production data. In the event of a major disaster affecting a storage appliance, Miria enables the organization to remain in production by providing users and business processes access to backed up data on a secondary storage.

The solution is made for companies in which production must be maintained. Disaster recovery is so rapid that operational impacts remain limited. Sectors such as genomic research, Media & Entertainment, automotive industries, or finance are just some examples of where Miria is a good fit.

The video below explains how Snapstor works and what its benefits are.

This animation takes a sideways look at the reality our customers experience when they face major storage unavailability. We can see:

• The helplessness while waiting for the storage equipment to be replaced or fixed,
• Failed attempts to restore backups to another type of storage,
• The long restoration time because a petabyte of data represents a huge number of folders, files and access rights,
• Our customers’ satisfaction when they activate Snapstor and run business-critical processes directly on the data protected by the backup on the secondary storage.
  
  

How does Snapstor enables business continuity ?

Matthieu Devulder:The purpose of Miria for Backup is the data protection for very large storage volumes. Technically, it is based on replicated snapshots that allow users to recover data and file shares as they were just before the incident. The objective is to return as close possible to the disaster (Recovery Point Objective) and limit data loss.

Snapstor allows rapid business recovery, and minimal production downtime. The focus here is to reach the Recovery Time Objective (RTO).

The switch from primary to secondary storage is so fast that users often do not realize that they are using a different storage. Snapstor ensures file availability as well as full ACLs and metadata management.

Geoffrey Bitard: During the activation of Snapstor, Miria makes the backup available to applications and users in the form of shares that can be read/write from the Miria repository. These shares are then used to maintain production and applications, and users can restart their activities.

Work directories are also protected by Miria for Backup as they are used. The day the storage is fixed or replaced; this data will also be restored along with older data during the storage rebuild phase. 

How does Snapstor enables the switch from secondary to primary storage ?

Matthieu Devulder: As soon as the storage is replaced, Miria helps to rebuild the primary storage. The data from the secondary storage that has become productive are replicated to the new primary storage. This operation can take a long time but has no impact, especially since the data is always served transparently to all users. At the end of this operation, a cut-over is triggered so that the primary site is once again serving data as before.

As soon as the storage is replaced, Miria will rebuild the contents of the primary storage. Thus, the data from the secondary storage that has become productive is replicated to the new primary storage. This operation can be time consuming but has no impact, especially since the data is always served transparently to all users. At the end of this operation, a cut-over is triggered so that the primary site is once again serving the data.

What are the storages compatibles with Snapstor ?

Matthieu Devulder: Snapstor is based on historical features of Miria, a universal and vendor agnostic platform that adapts to all types of environments. It is through Miria that the feature is so effective. Snapstor is already compatible with these storage arrays: GPFS, Qumulo, Huawei OceanStor and DELL Powerscale as target storages. This list will be soon expanded with support for Intelliflash and Vast Data NMS storage.

Miria and Snapstor are at the heart of the DRP (Disaster Recovery Plan) and BCP (Business Continuity Plan) procedures. We highly recommend you run an annual test to ensure the documentation is maintained, exhaustive and effective. 

More information:

• Miria 2021 R1 : New features
• Webinar Replay - Miria 2021 - Version Launch
• Miria 2020 : Version Release
• Data Tsunami EP1- Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery, David Chapa, Qumulo