Data Protection Infrastructure
Backup/Restore Infrastructure for protecting business-critical data

Novell's Backup infrastructure (called Storage Management Services™ or SMS) provides backup applications with the framework to develop a complete backup/restore solution. SMS helps backup file systems (such as NSS) or application data (such as data from GroupWise) on NetWare and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) to removable tape media or other media for off-site storage. The most significant property of SMS is its definition of a single consistent interface for all file systems and applications across NetWare and SLES.

SMS Components

SMS comprises of two primary components that provide functional abstractions.

Storage Management Data Requestor (SMDR) defines the API framework, provides remote connectivity and abstracts the details of any communication between servers.

Target Service Agent (TSA) provides an implementation of SMS APIs for a particular target. The TSA provides transparency by abstracting details of the specific service (such as NSS) being backed up. For example, various applications use file system TSA (TSAFS) to backup and restore NSS file system data and metadata (trustee assignments, namespaces, and file attributes).

SMS Links
SMS Features
  • Single consistent interface for all file systems and applications
  • Common data format on both SLES and NetWare
  • Ability to backup rich NSS metadata on NetWare and SLES
  • Ability to handle data across locales by providing data in UTF-8 format.
  • Format compatible with all older versions.
  • Predictive data caching model to improve performance
  • Cluster enabled