Introduction
The Network Data Management Protocol (NDMP) is an open protocol for enterprise-wide network based backup. The NDMP architecture allows network attached storage vendors to ship NDMP compliant file servers which can be used by any NDMP-compliant backup administration application. This same architecture is also used for network-attached backup devices, such as tape drives and tape libraries.
The purpose of this protocol is to allow a network backup application to control the backup and retrieval of an NDMP compliant server without installing third party software on the server. The control and data transfer components of the backup and recovery are separated. The separation allows complete interoperability at a network level. The file system vendors need only be concerned with maintaining compatibility with one, well-defined protocol.
The OpenSolaris implementation of NDMP is based on the SNIA reference port of NDMP, currently a work-in-progress release from the NDMP TWG. The SNIA reference implementation contains code contributed by Sun as well as from other SNIA participants. The SNIA effort has resulted in a BSD licensed implementation of NDMP v4 which we are now incorporating into Open Solaris.
Included in this implementation is the ndmp server, ndmpd, an administrative command line utility, ndmpadm, and ndmpstat, a utility providing backup and restore statistics. At the time of integration, the OpenSolaris NDMP server has been tested with Symantec NBU 6.5, EMC EBS 7.4, and IBM/Tivoli TSM 5.5.0.
Testing is continuing with products from Bakbone, Commvault, and Symantec.
What's New
NDMP source code was introduced into OpenSolaris beginning with Build 102. A binary-only release of NDMP was available in OpenSolaris beginning with Build 78. An NDMP protocol test suite is nearing completion and will be made available
in OpenSolaris.
Documentation
Instructions for building the source can be found at: [](http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/ndmp/README)
Source code
The source tarball can be downloaded via: [](http://dlc.sun.com/osol/on/downloads/current)