On Wed, 16 Feb 2000, Bruce Sterling Woodcock wrote:
Have you considered Netapp's recently announced ability to share backup devices between filers through a FC SAN using Legato and a Vixel switch?
Yes, but folks on my team have had suboptimal experiences with Legato software and Vixel hardware in the past, so I'm not too excited about it.
Personally I think you're spending a lot of money just to make backups faster, and I'm not even sure how much time that saves, since you have to spend time to do the rsync over the net first, and then do the local backup from the UNIX box.
My thinking is that with slow clients, throughput to a disk device will be faster than to a tape device, because of tape start/stop overhead. Therefore, the backup window (as far as the Netapps are concerned) is shortened. Data from local disk can then be sent to tape outside of the normal backup window. You do end up with two useful copies of your data, so the time spent moving data around isn't wasted.