NAS Backup and SAN Backup | NovaStor Data Storage and Backup Solutions

Whether your organization is utilizing stand-alone NAS devices, a scale-out NAS appliance or an enterprise class SAN infrastructure, NovaStor offers NAS backup software designed to intelligently manage your data storage of choice.

While support for efficient disaster recovery images, cluster configurations and storage pool creation offer maximum flexibility, multistreaming technology provides highly accelerated backup and restore speeds for your network regardless of which storage backup solution you choose.

Key features of NAS backup storage:

Easiest type of network attached storage backup to implement
File-level data storage device
Connects over Ethernet
Relatively inexpensive to add additional NAS devices
Offers data redundancy to your storage architecture
Automatic backup to other devices and to the cloud
Remote data availability 24/7

Key features of SAN backup storage:

Highly scalable architecture
Offers consolidated, block-level data storage
Extremely fast data access speeds
Very customizable in scale-up or scale-out configuration
Offers high performance for high-speed traffic
Runs on high speed Fibre Channel networks
Offers a fault tolerance network with redundant functionality
Not affected by network traffic bottlenecks

With multiple storage backup solutions to choose from for NAS backup and SAN backup storage, our backup experts provide you with a free consultation to help you find the right data protection solution for your IT infrastructure and business needs.

NAS Backup vs. SAN Backup

Network Attached Storage (NAS) is a dedicated hardware storage device that can be connected to a local area network. As an affordable storage solution, using a NAS backup strategy offers a way for organizations to “drop in” additional network storage with relatively minimal effort, often with built in redundancy. And scale-out NAS appliances use an architecture that lets companies grow by adding clustered nodes, for increased capacity and performance.

The downside of the traditional NAS backup approach is the inability to scale beyond the inherent limits of the system. A NAS has a preset amount memory, CPU horsepower, drive slots and data throughput. Once it reaches capacity, options become limited. While purchasing additional NAS appliances, which are each managed separately, works fine for small businesses, this approach may become unmanageable for large IT environments utilizing enterprise backup hardware.

Storage Area Network (SAN) is a network of interconnected storage devices, switches and cables that offer block-level network access to all storage devices (tape libraries, raid arrays, etc.) and offers the convenience of central management. Enterprises with rapidly growing data may find that a dedicated storage network is required to the achieve high-speed connectivity that meets their backup demands. SAN backup is often done over Fibre Channel, offering highest access speeds and availability for media and mission critical data.

NovaStor offers network backup solutions that work with both NAS and SAN storage. If you choose a NAS backup strategy, we recommend taking the steps necessary to protect your NAS backup server from ransomware.

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What Storage Area Network (SANs) do you support?

NovaStor supports a wide range of network backup solutions that utilize Storage Area Networks (SAN) with protocols including FC, iSCSI, NFS, CIFS, and SMB.

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What NAS devices do you support?

NovaStor's NAS backup software products should support any NAS device that is available on the market, including popular hardware NAS devices such as Buffalo, Synology, ioSafe, and QNAP as well as software NAS devices such as FreeNAS.

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Do I need to have the share on the NAS mapped locally?

No, NovaStor products do not require a NAS share to be mapped locally. That would be a security risk to map the NAS locally which we like to avoid at all costs.

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Do I need to install the backup software on the NAS itself?

No, there is nothing to install on the NAS itself. You would need to have a share already defined on the NAS as well as the permissions set up on that share, and you will need to know those permissions at the time of defining the NAS as a Network Device inside the NovaStor software to be able to then back up to that NAS.

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My NAS says it is full, yet there is plenty of room, what is wrong?

There can be a couple of reasons why this could be occurring, and both answers that we will cover are often seen by NovaStor’s Support team.

1. The first reason this can occur is if the NAS share, where backups are storing to, is currently configured with the “Network Recycle Bin” feature of the NAS enabled on the NAS share where NovaStor software is set as the destination storage location for backups. You will want to disable the Network Recycle Bin (“Recycle Bin”) feature of that share on your NAS where backups are storing to. You will do this from within the NAS device web-based interface as a one-time settings change on the backup share itself. Be aware that the majority of modern NAS devices have this feature enabled by default, for sure Buffalo, Synology and QNAP tend to enable that by default especially on the default share that the NAS ships with. If that feature is enabled then the Retention feature in NovaStor software will not be able to do anything for you to remove oldest backups, as the backup sets that NovaStor Retention job is set to retent (delete) will only be moved to another folder on the NAS by the “Network Recycle Bin” setting that is part of the share configuration on the NAS itself.

2. The second reason this can occur that the NAS device has run out of space is because the backup software is set to create a new backup set each time a backup job runs and does not overwrite the existing backups. NovaStor software allows a creation of a Retention job that will work on NAS devices to automatically retent (delete) oldest backups, based on age or count or a combination of both.

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