Network Appliance Inc has announced the latest release of its OnTap operating system, 5.3, and is boasting of two new utilities, SnapRestore and SnapMirror. Both are based on snapshot technology built into microkernel. Mike Marchi, director of enterprise marketing, explains that SnapRestore is a snapshot- restart utility. It provides a data recovery mechanism by taking snapshots of the system state. If a software upgrade, for example, goes drastically wrong, the system can revert to its state at the last snapshot. NetApp will provide this utility for $2000 to $9000.
With SnapMirror, users can replicate data from one file server to another. It’s a cost-effective disaster recovery solution, Marachi explains, the remote filesystem is always in a consistent state. Administrators can maintain the remote file system as read-only, until in the event of a disaster, the backup server can be changed to read/write mode and used as the main file system. SnapMirror is priced from $10,000 to $50,000.
