Steve Gremban writes,
The DAR specification in v2 was too ambiguous and nobody used it. The implementations that are just becoming available are based on extensive work done on DAR in v4.
Once Guinness is released there will be a way in Veritas to capture the DAR positioning info during backup so that in a future release of Netbackup you will be able to use DAR to restore it.
NDMP v2 and v3 both specify DAR. The DAR semantics are basically unchanged between these versions of the spec. (I don't anticipate any DAR change in v4, either, other than, perhaps, tighter language.) NetApp implemented DAR in ONTAP releases prior to Guinness but it didn't work reliably, thus no one used it. (We tried.) Those ONTAP 5 releases do, however, produce file position information that are valid; so, any backup vendor that saves file positions generated at ONTAP >=5 will be able to use them for DAR at ONTAP >=6. It's important to keep in mind that there were no NDMP protocol changes to support ONTAP 6; rather, it implements both NDMP v2 and v3 and supports DAR, reliably, after negotiating either protocol version. Meanwhile, the NDMP WG continues to hash out the v4 definition.
I'm assuming from Jim's message that Workstation Solutions has DAR implemented for Quickrestore and it's interoperable with a Netapp running Guinness.
Just so: QR supports DAR with ONTAP 6, even for filer backups performed with QR at ONTAP 5.
Best, Jim