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BRU Server and Apple Xsan Backup Support

Apple's Xsan filesystem allows Mac OS X Server users to implement very large filesystems while retaining the relative ease of management that they've come to expect from an Apple system management standpoint.  BRU Server brings a similar ease of use to the backup of the Xsan environment.  In fact, BRU products have been supporting the Xsan platform dating back to the original ADIC StorNext filesystem (the basis of Xsan) for Solaris platforms in the late 1990's.  In a manner of speaking, BRU Products were successfully backing up and restoring Xsan before it was Xsan.

Because BRU Server is filesystem agnostic, the backup of an Xsan storage pool volume works with one minor modification of a configuration file on the client system where the Xsan is mounted for backup purposes.  This change is simply to let the BRU Server agent understand that the Xsan volume is not an HFS+ volume as it reports so that we know to process it properly with regards to the Apple-specific extensions such as resource forks and Finder™ info metadata.

With that one exception, BRU Server processes an Xsan volume exactly like any other filesystem for backup with one additional feature - BRU Server (and BRU in general) is Realtime I/O aware and acts as a gated application when backing up an Xsan storage pool volume.  This design insures that BRU products respond properly to Realtime I/O requests placed on Xsan storage pools by applications such as Final Cut Pro, Logic, and others.  During these periods, BRU processes will allow I/O from the Xsan storage pool volume to drop as low as 1K/sec to allow the Xsan to respond to Realtime I/O while still maintaining non-throttled I/O in the range of 80 to 95MB/sec to Fibre-Channel LTO-3 tape (D2T) and upwards of 125MB/sec to another Fibre-Channel RAID volume (D2D).

In addition to providing proper logical filesystem level backup support, BRU uses the filesystem's metadata cues for the determination of the incremental or differential contents for non-Full backup operations.  This means that BRU can start an incremental or differential backup immediately, rather than spending what can become hours pre-scanning a large Xsan storage pool.  This translates to a greatly reduced backup time for incremental or differential operations.

Finally, because BRU Server's catalog structure allows for searching for files across different backups and dates, you can issue a simple search command to locate all revisions of a given file across multiple archives and select a single revision for restore by selecting the proper file from the results listing, sorted by either archive or date.  This means that restoring a single file from a multi-terabyte Xsan backup is still an operation that requires minutes instead of hours.  As part of the restore process, BRU Server will allow you to restore the requested file to either its original location or restore it to another path - or even another system.