Novell Doc: OES 2: man pages Manpage of sms

sms

Section: Environments, Tables, and Troff Macros (7)
Updated: 22 November 2004
Index Return to OES 2 Main Contents

NAME

SMS - Novell Storage Management Services

DESCRIPTION

Novell Storage Management Services (SMS) provides backup applications with the infrastructure to develop a complete backup/restore solution. SMS helps back up file systems (such as NSS) or applications (such as GroupWise) on NetWare and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) to removable tape media or other media for off-site storage. The most significant property of SMS is its definition of a single consistent interface for all file systems and applications across NetWare and SLES. The SMS framework is implemented by two main components - The Storage Management Data Requester (SMDR) and the Target Service Agent (TSA). Storage Management Data Requester (SMDR) defines the API framework, provides remote connectivity and abstracts the details of any communication between servers. SMDR does not, by design, understand details of any particular target or service and therefore can be used generically to provide a communication channel to backup any target remotely. Target Service Agent (TSA) provides an implementation of SMS APIs for a particular target. The TSA provides transparency by abstracting details of the specific service (such as GroupWise, NSS) being backed up. For example, various applications use file system TSA to back up and restore NSS file system data and metadata( trustee assignments , namespaces, and file attributes). Typically, there exists one TSA for every logical target. For example, the file system target is backed up by the TSA for the file system, while iFolder maybe backed up by the TSA for iFolder. SMDR is implemented as a daemon in the user address space (see smdrd(8)) and each target service is implemented as a shared object that is dynamically loaded by SMDR based on application requests to backup a particular target.

PROPERTIES

Novell SMS has the following properties:

* SMS exposes a single consistent interface across all file systems and applications on NetWare and SLES. The same interface can be used to back up a file system such as NSS or an application such as iFolder.
* Every SMS target service registers itself with SMDR which in turn advertises the registered services. This provides location transparency when interacting with SMS services on the network.
* SMS is a cross platform service. Across platforms, the API abstraction remains the same, and therefore, it is possible to interact with different target services irrespective of which platform it is hosted on.
* SMS components can be configured using iManager or configuration files. Using iManager, it is possible to configure remote servers hosting SMS services.
* SMS services expose data in Unicode format, therefore making them locale independent. This helps in backing up and restoring target specific data from different server or target service locales.
* SMS is cluster enabled and target services that support clusters can be backed up without interruptions due to cluster failovers or failbacks.
* SMS ensures backward compatibility at all times, newer versions of SMS can restore older backups of a target service.
* SMS can be used to backup rich metadata that NSS supports on both NetWare and SLES.
* Data backed up on one platform can be restored to the other using SMS. For example, file system target service data from one platform can be restored onto another platform running a similar file system target service.
* SMS employs a predictive data caching model to improve performance of backups.

APPLICATION NOTES

For more information regarding SMS administration see, Storage Management Services Administration Guide For information regarding application development using SMS see, SMS Developer Components

AUTHOR

Novell, Inc.

COPYRIGHT

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