Historically when data protection is mentioned, most immediately think of tape backup. However, over the past several years, some emerging technologies like replication, synchronization and snapshots have taken their place within the data protection realm. Snapshots offer quick user-level restores without the need for administrative assistance, while synchronization and replication provide business continuance and offsite disaster recovery.

Isilon offers several solutions or data availability and data protection. This paper examines several challenges and recommends solutions for ensuring data availability in an Isilon scale-out NAS clustered storage environment. The best solutions typically involve the use of multiple technologies.