Hi Shaun,
Sorry to see that you've "switched away from NDMP",
since this is the strategic direction for backups
at Network Appliance.
I understand your pain though and there's no doubting
that we did have issues in our implementation of the
NDMP server within the filer. About 8 or 9 months ago
we made a concerted effort to resolve these issues and
work harder at syncing up with 3rd party backup management
software vendors so that their certification efforts
would produce solid product solutions as close to our FCS
dates as possible.
I believe this effort has paid off and that we have fixed
our issues in 5.2.*. For 5.3 we ported the NDMP server to
run in the Java Virtual Machine & support V3. Results so
far have shown some bugs, reported on toasters, but these
have been fixed and we have a very stable product.
Regarding certification Legato, Veritas & CommVault are all
currently testing our 5.2.3 & 5.3.2 maintenance releases, so
we seemed to have closed this loop too.
> Lastly, we find that backing up a filer to it's local tape drive to be
> substantially slower than backing it up across the net to our SGI Origin
> 2000 media server. Not only is it faster, it puts less of a load on the
> filer as well.
If backing up "over the wire" is faster for you then go for it,
especially if it puts less load on the filer. I'd be interested
in sysstat output for both solutions. We currently recommend that
customers use the DLT 7000 where possible since its much faster
than the DLT 4000, so a lot of our data is based on writing to
the DLT 7000.
> I had a DLT4000 drive attached to my filers (an F540 & an F330) and was
> backing them up via NDMP with BudTool. When I replaced the F540 with an
> F740, I couldn't move the tape over, as F740 had a different SCSI setup,
> so we bagan backing it up across a dedicated 100Mb FD link to our SGI
> Origin 2000. We found it to be substantially faster than what the F540
> could do to tape, and it got rid of the NDMP hassles. Mind you, we are
> not backing it up over NFS, but using BudTool's dump.NetApp class with
> NDMP turned off on the filer, so we're still using the filer's dump and
> restore, which means we don't lose any ACLs.
If BudTool is using the dump.NetApp class then you *are* still using
NDMP, but instead of directing the backup stream to local tape, its
going out a socket to your SGI Origin system. Writing to the network
can yield a better throughput than writing to a DLT 4000, so perhaps
the SGI Origin is able to stream to a DLT 4000 faster.
> Yesterday, after upgrading it to 5.2.2P1, I tried backing my F330 up
> across the network in the same manner as my F740, and found it to be
> incredibly faster. It takes BudTool, via NDMP, to a local drive, 16+
> hours to back up a 12GB directory, but I can back it up, using the same
> dump and restore, over the net to my SGI, in 1 hour and 43 minutes. The
> SGI is writing the data to yet another DLT4000, so it would appear that
> the filers are the bottleneck - that they write to tape horribly slow.
> So, I don't think I want to do that any more - not when flinging it
> across my net gives me such a huge speed up.
This is good info & I agree with your analysis that somehow the
data path to a DLT 4000 on a SGI Origin seems to be faster than
a locally attached DLT 4000.
Cheers,
Grant
=========== grant(a)netapp.com ========== Grant Melvin
=== === Mgr, FS Recovery Group
=== === Network Appliance
=== |\ | __ ___ /\ __ __ === 495 East Java Drive
=== | \ | |__ | /__\ |__| |__| === Sunnyvale
=== | \| |__ | / \ | | (R) === California
=== === 94089
=== === Tel:(408)822-6761
=========== Network Appliance ========== Fax:(408)822-4457/4525/4559
-----Original Message-----
From: Shaun T. Erickson [mailto:ste@research.bell-labs.com]
Sent: Tuesday, July 20, 1999 5:49 AM
To: 'toasters(a)mathworks.com'
Subject: Non-NDMP backup solutions?
I keep hearing about backup alternatives that use NDMP. What solutions
are there if you *don't* want to use NDMP? We have several reasons for
not wanting to use it.
We have had nothing but grief because we relied on using NDMP. First,
NetApp's implementation had a memory leak that caused backup's to fail
after the filer had been up for a month and, if not caught quickly & the
filer rebooted, would cause NFS to get flaky, in that it would respond
to some requests and ignore others, getting progressively worse until
the filer would crash. As a result, we had to reboot the filer on a
monthly basis. This lasted for over a year, during which time we were
repeatedly told to upgrade to the latest version of Ontap, because it
was always supposedly fixed in that release.
Because of the frequent upgrades, (which continue to happen, but for
other reasons) we frequently ran into problems because of
incompatibilities between NetApp's implementation of NDMP and BudTool's.
Then, when we'd try to get support, we were always told that the version
of Ontap we were running wasn't certified with BudTool, so it was always
a major pain to get support. To be fair, BudTool broke NDMP on occasion,
as well, with their upgrades. The end result was the same, however.
Lastly, we find that backing up a filer to it's local tape drive to be
substantially slower than backing it up across the net to our SGI Origin
2000 media server. Not only is it faster, it puts less of a load on the
filer as well.
So, having switched away from NDMP, for the above reasons, I have no
burning desire to switch back, and am looking for backup solutions that
do not require it. Although not the scope of this list, I need to back
up Sun Solaris, IRIX & NT systems, as well.
What is there available?
-ste
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