Cobalt Iron Introduces New NAS Protection Features to Improve NAS Backup and Recovery

LAWRENCE, Kan. – June 1, 2023 – Cobalt Iron Inc., a leading provider of SaaS-based enterprise data protection, today announced the launch of Compass NAS Protector, a new set of features in its Cobalt Iron Compass^® enterprise SaaS backup platform. Intended to aid enterprise NAS and backup administrators, Compass NAS Protector speeds up backups, simplifies management of NAS data, and improves and consolidates backup operations.

Backup and recovery of network-attached storage (NAS) systems are often-neglected areas of IT operations. In addition, while NAS usage is prevalent and is projected to keep growing, there have been few improvements in the past decade or two in the techniques for protecting and restoring NAS data.

The most commonly used approaches for NAS data protection are file-level backup, NAS replication, and Network Data Management Protocol (NDMP) backup. These techniques have glaring disadvantages. Traditional file-level backup gets bogged down while scanning and protecting very large NAS environments. NAS replication and NDMP techniques limit recovery flexibility, lose opportunities for policy-based data management, add one-off operational complexities, and tend to increase costs.

The new Compass NAS Protector provides a competitive advantage over aging NAS protection techniques in use today. It allows a new, optimized approach to protecting NAS data that:

• Accelerates NAS file identification and NAS data backups.
• Enables recovery flexibility, such as restoring to different device types and locations.
• Provides policy-based management of NAS data at the file/object level.
• Simplifies NAS backup operations and consolidates them with the rest of enterprise data protection.
• Provides a single data protection solution for traditional NAS filers and cloud NAS services.
• Employs efficient data-reduction techniques on NAS data, such as incremental forever backups, deduplication, and compression.

Compass NAS Protector is an innovative technology for identifying new, changed, and deleted NAS files compared with the Compass inventory. Proprietary scanning and identification processes optimize parallelism in NAS share/export scanning. Enhanced data-movement processing enables high-speed, parallel backup and archiving. And the technology ensures NAS device independence to consistently protect physical, virtual, and cloud NAS share/export resources.

Compass NAS Protector is automatically available to existing and new Compass users at no additional cost.

“Protection of NAS data is typically inefficient and cumbersome, especially for very large NAS systems,” said Rob Marett, chief technology officer at Cobalt Iron. “The Compass NAS Protector introduces proprietary NAS scanning and identification processes that optimize NAS data protection — something you won’t find with other backup products. Optimizing NAS backups is an example of Cobalt Iron’s strategy to improve every aspect of the backup and restore experience.”