# What Protection Manager is

Protection Manager helps you to manage backups and mirror relationships of data on NetApp storage systems, and perform failover operations easily and efficiently by eliminating repetitive tasks and by automating some tasks. It uses objects called datasets, policies, and resource pools to automate routine data-protection tasks and manage backup and mirror relationships. It enables you to manage large-scale deployments easily.

The Protection Manager application can perform the following actions:

- Use policies to manage primary data, storage, and backup and mirror relationships

- Manage local and remote backups and mirror copies

- Provision the secondary storage for backups and mirrored copies based on policies you assign

- Enable disaster recovery capability if you install the licensed disaster recovery option

- Automatically validate your backup and disaster recovery configuration with a conformance checker

The Protection Manager user interface runs in NetApp Management Console.

Anyone using Protection Manager should be familiar with general data-protection and disaster recovery concepts. Protection Manager uses Data ONTAP data-protection technologies, such as Snapshot copies, SnapVault, Open Systems SnapVault, and SnapMirror.