SMTape features such as tape seeding, backup of Snapshot copies, incremental and differential backups, and preservation of deduplication and compression features on restored volumes help you optimize your tape backup and restore operations.
The following are the features of SMTape:
- Provides a high performance disaster recovery solution.
- Does not require a license.
- Storage systems support only 32 concurrent backup and restore sessions.
Even if another node is taken over, the storage system allows only 32 sessions instead of 64 sessions.
- Supported only on NDMP v4.
- Supports restore of backup images that were created across up to two major Data ONTAP releases.
For example, on a storage system running Data ONTAP 8.1.x, you can restore data backed up from Data ONTAP 7.3.x and Data ONTAP 8.0.x.
- Supports restore of an incremental backup in Data ONTAP 8.1.1.
- Supports restore of data backed up in Data ONTAP 8.0.x from 32-bit or 64-bit aggregates to volumes in 64-bit aggregates in Data ONTAP 8.1.x and later.
Note: You can restore data to volumes created across up to two major consecutive Data ONTAP releases only.
For example, if you back up data in Data ONTAP 8.0.x from either a 32-bit or a 64-bit aggregate, then you can restore this data to volumes in 64-bit aggregates in Data ONTAP 8.1.x and the next major Data ONTAP release.
- Supports tape seeding.
- Supports concurrent volume SnapMirror and SMTape backup operations when backing up SnapMirror destination to tape.
- Supports backup of Snapshot copies.
- Supports deduplicated volumes and preserves deduplication on the restored volumes.
- Supports blocking factor in multiples of 4 KB, in the range of 4 KB to 256 KB.
- Supports backup of large aggregate volumes.
- Supports backup of compressed volumes and preserves compression on the restored volumes.
- Supports incremental and differential backups.