Ian> I’m curious what other people are using for software to back up Ian> volumes to tape? We’ve recently purchased a Dell TL4000 with 2 x Ian> LTO7 drives and 24 tapes. We have a four-node cluster running Ian> 8.3.2Px and for now we’re directly connecting the TL4000’s A-side Ian> FC to node 1 and the B-side to node 3. AFAIK the device itself Ian> is set up correctly and all the physical and virtual status LEDs Ian> and are happy.
We're in the process of upgrading to 8.3.x from 8.2.3 cDOT just so we can properly use Netbackup with NDMP at the VServer level. Under 8.2, it just doesnt' work reliably. I'm hoping that this upgrade will make it work properly.
In any case, you should make sure that each head on the cluster has access to all the tape drives, otherwise you'll probably have a bunch of your backups running across the Cluster Network to do your dumps. And you *might* not be able to NDMP from all vservers.
Ian> After installing the correct TCF file, ‘sysconfig –t’ run against Ian> the directly connected nodes shows the drive as supported (IBM Ian> LTO-7 ULT3580) with all sorts of device name permutations Ian> (rewind, no rewind, unload, etc). Running ‘storage tape show’ Ian> shows two tape drives, one per directly attached node, named st0 Ian> and a media changer on node 3 named mc0. The tape drives are Ian> offline, the media changer is available.
Ian> I’ve played with the various ‘storage tape’ commands but am Ian> making no headway. I’m sure the docs are out there, and I’ve Ian> looked through the NetApp documentation as well as Googling for a Ian> while, but don’t see a way to control the media changer to, for Ian> example, tell tape drive 1 to load slot 6, and then another Ian> command to dump a volume to it. I understand we want SVM-scoped Ian> ndmp. Does anyone have bare bones examples using ndmp or some Ian> other local utility? If we need to purchase something like Ian> Tivoli or Netbackup or CommVault etc then I guess we will, but Ian> we’d prefer free.
There's no free NDMP (especially three way NDMP where it's initiated by a server, dumped by a node to a local tape drive, and the index of files and tape positions sent back to the server).
You're going to have to bite the bullet.
Personally, I'd go with EMC's Legato Networker (not that I've used it in anger for years and years... but the CLI is/was excellent), then probably Netbackup 7.7.x which is what we use now.
I've also run CommVault 7, 8 & now 9 for quite a number of years and I dislike it alot. It's a pain to use, indexes expire so damn quickly it's not funny, and it's just not fun to use.
But... it's cheaper than the other options.
John