Unlocking the Power of NAS Backup Efficiency with Druva’s New Proxy Pooling Feature

In today's data-driven world, the volume of unstructured data is growing exponentially. Whether you're managing large enterprise file shares, critical business information, or sensitive customer data, safeguarding this data is paramount.

However, managing NAS backups in large-scale environments presents significant challenges for IT teams. With massive amounts of unstructured data, enterprises need robust solutions to ensure data is protected without compromising performance. Traditional NAS backup systems often struggle with issues such as overloaded proxies, inconsistent backup speeds, and limited resiliency. When a proxy fails or becomes overwhelmed, it can lead to delays, bottlenecks, and even data loss, putting critical information at risk. In this blog post, we explore these issues and explain how Druva’s latest advancement for NAS workloads: NAS Proxy Pooling feature addresses them.

What is NAS Proxy Pooling?

Druva’s NAS Proxy Pooling is a feature designed to bring enhanced resiliency and load balancing to NAS backup operations. It introduces a pool-based architecture that allows organizations to dynamically manage backup proxies for NAS workloads, significantly improving the efficiency, resiliency and management of NAS backup processes.

Here’s what makes this feature valuable for enterprises handling large-scale NAS environments:

Resiliency for Seamless Backups

NAS data protection can be complex, especially when dealing with multiple NAS proxies responsible for handling large datasets. Druva’s NAS Proxy Pooling ensures increased resiliency by distributing backup jobs across a pool of proxies. In the event that a proxy becomes unavailable, the system automatically shifts the jobs to other proxies in the pool, ensuring uninterrupted backups and preventing potential data loss.

Load Balancing for Optimal Performance

The Proxy Pooling feature ensures load balancing by uniformly distributing NAS backups across the available proxies within the pool. This prevents overloading a single proxy while underutilizing others, allowing for efficient resource utilization and faster backup times. No more bottlenecks or delays—just smooth, balanced operations.

Understanding the Architecture of NAS Proxy Pooling

Druva’s NAS Proxy Pooling architecture leverages a distributed proxy model to improve resiliency and load balancing for large NAS environments. Here’s a closer look at the different components:

Proxies in the Pool

Several proxies—represented as both Windows and Linux servers—are grouped together in a pool. Each proxy can be dynamically added or removed based on the current demands of the backup jobs. Having multiple proxies in the pool ensures that no single proxy becomes a bottleneck during backups, and that backups remain resilient to potential proxy failures.

Mapping of NAS Devices and Associated Backupsets to Pool 

With Druva’s NAS Proxy Pooling, NAS devices are now mapped to a proxy pool rather than individual proxies. Backupsets created for NAS shares of such devices will now be affiliated with a proxy pool that was mapped to the associated NAS Device. This shift offers significant benefits as highlighted above and further in this blog.

Dynamic Scaling for Onboarding and Beyond

A common challenge for businesses onboarding large NAS datasets is managing the initial heavy load of data ingestion. To handle the vast volumes of data during this phase, customers often deploy a higher number of backup proxies. However, as the need transitions to incremental backups, the proxy demand decreases significantly.

Druva’s NAS Proxy Pooling is the perfect solution for these changing needs. Customers can dynamically add or remove proxies from a pool without making manual configuration changes. This flexibility allows for:

• Efficient scaling during the onboarding phase, when the bulk of the data is being backed up.
• Streamlined operations afterward, as proxies can be reduced to meet the more modest requirements of incremental backups.

With the introduction of this feature, the complexity is reduced, and administrative overhead is minimized. As a result, customers benefit from simplified management, ensuring NAS backups are always optimized, without needing constant hands-on intervention.

Druva’s Comprehensive NAS Backup Solution: A Holistic Approach to Data Protection

Druva is revolutionizing how organizations manage and protect their NAS data with a full suite of features designed to ensure efficiency, scalability, and resilience. Druva’s NAS backup solution is built with modern enterprises in mind, offering cloud-native flexibility, streamlined management, and robust protection for unstructured data.

Here’s what sets Druva’s NAS backup offering apart from Proxy Pooling:

Accelerated incremental backup for NAS

Druva’s unique Advanced Smart Scan makes it significantly faster for customers to protect NAS shares, resulting in an up to 50x improvement in throughput for incremental backups. 

Ransomware protection and Data Resiliency Guarantee

Druva delivers secure, air-gapped backups so you always have safe, unencrypted data to recover. For select workloads, Druva offers accelerated ransomware recovery tools including anomaly detection, quarantine, and malware scanning, so you can recover with confidence.

Druva introduced the industry’s most comprehensive data resiliency guarantee, the only program backed by the reliability, security, and availability of the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud. In adopting the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud, customers can now gain even more confidence that they are protected against a wide variety of data loss and downtime events across five key risk categories: cyber, human, application, operation, and environmental. 

Conclusion

Druva’s NAS Proxy Pooling brings unparalleled resiliency and efficiency to NAS data protection, making it a crucial asset for enterprises managing large-scale NAS environments. With its dynamic proxy allocation, load balancing, and flexible scaling capabilities, this feature allows businesses to seamlessly adapt to evolving data needs, optimize performance, and minimize the risk of disruptions. Coupled with Druva’s comprehensive suite of NAS backup solutions—including accelerated incremental backups, ransomware protection, and the industry’s most robust data resiliency guarantee—Druva empowers organizations to safeguard their unstructured data with confidence, streamline backup operations, and enhance overall data resiliency.

Learn more about our NAS and unstructured data protection solutions or read more about our latest feature NAS Proxy Pooling today and ensure your NAS data is always protected, no matter the scale.