On 2020-10-27 19:28, John Stoffel wrote:
Sami> Anyone using Cohesity or Rubrik for Netapp CIFS NAS backup? Sami> Considering these, looking for experiences,
In my experience with backups, no one cares. It's only about restores. And being able to quickly and easily search through backups for the file(s) to restore. So test that side of things first.
Exactly. Since years, I always write this "Restore/Backup". *Not* Backup/Restore. That's not to say that RPO (aka ADL, Acceptable Data Loss) is unimportant. But the end users, the data owners, do not care one bit about *how* that works. And until the need a restore, they couldn't care less so you can do whatever you want including not taking the backups except THAT ONE some user wants a restore from ;-)
Sorry. Couldn't resist.
The backup taking problem w Rubrik is that it's host based. SMB ("NAS") based backups taken by a Rubrik server, will traverse the file tress, scan them over and over and over again and then pull the data out (night time perhaps...) via the front end traffic intrefaces the same as where your user workload is all the time. In a Hi File Count environment (HFC) with billions of files and lots of "churn" (WRITE-DEL-WRITE-DEL-WRITE-DEL,...) this is not going to work well for you. The backups will just never finish; the backup window problem revisited. Back to the 1990's.
So with ONTAP gear you have the SnapDiff API. And then it can work quite well. No problem -- should be OK even in a HFC environment
John Stoffel wrote:
In personal experience, Networker (EMC, was Legato) was awesome for doing restores, the file indexes stayed online and made searching trivial.
I concur. Like John says: was Legato. It was good in this respect. I have no historical hands on experience w CommVault but what I know about it in theory has made me/us stay away from it. Every assessment, w a few years in between has made me go "... no."
My options expressed here of course.
If you follow Johns good advice here, not that much can go wrong for you IMHO.
/M
John Stoffel wrote:
CommVault... sucks for this. The indexes get purged so damn fast that you're always pulling back tapes just for the indexes, etc. Painful.
So test this part of your backup scheme first, or find the user forums for Cohesity/Rubrik and ask that question there. And of course try to ask people who have the same size environment as you want to backup as well.
Cheers, John