Space and time savings

The disk footprint savings with DAOS continues into the backup processing as well. The NLO files represent the static data that used to reside in the NSF, and was backed up every cycle even though it hadn't changed. In a typical mail environment, a large reduction in the NSF footprint plus a very small amount of NLO data means the reduction in the NSF footprint translates almost directly into a reduction in the backup footprint. Not only is the duplicate data being eliminated, the mail file data is being separated into static and dynamic components. By applying an incremental backup regimen to the static (NLO) data, only the NLO files created since the last backup cycle need to be processed. That represents typically a very small amount of data compared with the entire set of NLO files. Using DAOS enables backup software solutions to optimally backup the NLO files.

This is because once an NLO is written to disk, it never changes. Therefore, the file need only be backed up once in its lifetime. Based on the example shown in the DAOS Estimator document [link], the space saving per full backup would be 38.8 GB, roughly equal to the number of shared NLO's times the average NLO size.

In the incremental backup case, duplicate NLO's will not be backup up again. Thus, the space savings from DAOS is directly proportional to the number of duplicate NLO's seen in the environment, and the backup time savings is the product of the space saved and the backup throughput.