This is an announcement of a new standards effort for NDMP,
Network Data Management Protocol, version 4. We are hoping to
start up an NDMP effort under the IETF. We would appreciate
if anyone interested in the areas of data management,
including archival, backup, restore, replication,
mirroring, would review and consider participating in this effort.
The following summarize the status of NDMP:
- A new draft, draft-ndmpv4-001.txt is in the process of
becoming available in the IETF drafts directory.
- The NDMP effort was started in 1996. Currently NDMP versions 2
and 3 are supported by more than 10 vendors of disk and tape
based storage systems, as well as vendors of data management
applications. More than 5 additional companies are implementing
NDMP based products for the first time.
- The version 4 draft has been produced by a group of
approx. 10 people representing 6 companies.
Several others have contributed in the review of the
draft in weekly teleconferences and on the mailing list.
- The effort has been organized through the mailing list
ndmp-tech(_at_)ndmp(_dot_)org, and the web site www.ndmp.org.
The web site has email archives going back to the
work on version 2, as well as a number of "backgrounder"
documents for version 4 as well as future NDMP work.
- As an introduction to the protocol, first read the
abstract of the draft:
Abstract
The Network Data Management Protocol (NDMP) is an open
protocol for enterprise wide network based data management.
NDMP defines a TCP/IP based mechanism for
controlling the transfer of data between
primary and secondary storage subsystems on behalf of
data archival or backup and recovery operations. NDMP provides
architectural separation of the network attached Data
Management Application (DMA), Data Servers and Tape Servers
participating in archival or recovery operations.
NDMP also provides low level control
of tape devices and tape library robotics on behalf of
DMAs. Multi-vendor interoperability and extensibility
are key goals of NDMP.
To further clarify:
1: NDMP is focused on allowing a data management
application to set up and *manage* a data
management session, such as backup, between a
source and a target.
The source can be a server with direct attached storage
or a file server appliance. The target can be a
server with a tape drive, or a tape library appliance.
2: NDMP is agnostic to the data format sent from the
source to the target.
3: NDMP is agnostic to the transport mechanism used to
transport the data between source and target.
- There is storage related work under way in the IP Storage working
groups. The two existing drafts: "Fibre Channel over TCP/IP", and
"iSCSI" focuses on the transport of the data over the Internet. NDMP
focuses on the control of the participating parties in the session.
It is therefore our understanding that NDMP is orthogonal
to ongoing storage related work in the IETF.
- There is work going on in the IETF in the area of "reliable sever
pooling" (RSERPOOL). Although the goal is for NDMP sessions to be
"highly reliable applications", there does not seem to be any direct
connection between RSERPOOL and NDMP.
We ask that all interested parties contact the NDMP group
by sending email to ndmp-tech(_at_)ndmp(_dot_)org(_dot_) One can be added to
this
mailing list from the "NDMP Initiative" page on www.ndmp.org.
We will have a discussion on the ndmp-tech(_at_)ndmp(_dot_)org mailing list to
decide which are the appropriate next steps to take.
On behalf of the NDMP effort,
Harald Skardal
Harald Skardal,
Network Appliance Inc.,
Email: Harald(_dot_)Skardal(_at_)netapp(_dot_)com,
Tel: 603.882.3881,
Cel: 603.566.3027.