NAS addition

"In today's enterprises, tremendous amounts of business-critical data are held in NAS systems. The amount of stored NAS data and the urgency to protect it is constantly growing; however, NAS backup and recovery techniques haven't improved much over the years," said Greg Tevis, vice president of Global Strategy at Cobalt Iron. "Compared to traditional NAS schemes such as NDMP, which can be operationally challenging and often results in massive amounts of data being stored for backups, our NAS data protection extension offers a new and modern approach. Using the Compass NAS Agent, Compass is a faster, more efficient, and easier-to-manage solution for backing up billions of files and providing unified protection of critical NAS data."

The Compass NAS Agent is optimized for customer NAS workloads, providing advanced functionality, high efficiencies, cost savings, and improved service levels for backup and recovery, including target independent restores. The NAS Agent provides a single backup solution to replace the multiple NDMP silos that often add complexity to an enterprise backup and recovery environment, protecting NAS data in a manner consistent with other enterprise data backup mechanisms.

By backing up data rather than devices, the Compass NAS Agent enables users to manage NAS data based on business policies and to restore data whenever and wherever it is needed. NAS backup and restore operations are also integrated into a centralized, web-based dashboard that provides full visibility into the entire backup landscape. Since Compass operates in a parallel workflow rather than the sequential workflow of NDMP, backup and recovery performance can also be significantly improved.

"Of course, Cobalt Iron supports NDMP and other NAS backup mechanisms. But one big difference is that Compass is delivered as software as a service, thereby eliminating the daily grind of NDMP management. Enterprises can pay as they grow and scale the solution out based on their growth rates and business requirements," Tevis added. "By leveraging proxy capabilities, the Compass NAS Agent offers a far superior approach that increases backup efficiency and improves restore flexibility. It's one more example of the Cobalt Iron promise — to transform our customers' investments and experiences through modern approaches to enterprise data protection that are simple, secure, and automated."