There is no native tape integration in SM products. The ways I can think of:
1. Just back up the whole volume snapshot(s) using NDMP by configuring SME to use _recent for snapshot name and configuring your backup application to save _recent snapshot(s). This will give you more or less disaster recovery solution – whole LUN that could be restored back if needed.
2. Mount snapshot(s) on the same or another proxy server and simply back up them as files. There is no need to use special Exchange agent as files are effectively read-only. In this case you do not need extra NDMP licenses and infrastructure and potentially could use these backups for more fine grained restore (e.g. just a single corrupted file), it is easier to redirect restore to alternative location etc.
The former is relatively straightforward – SME can be configured to always use the same name for most recent snapshot, so you just configure your backup application to save it. No special configuration is really needed, but you have to synchronize schedule for both. The latter requires fair amount of scripting.
Both could be initiated using custom SME post-backup script.
As for restoring – I expect you would need to manually recover Exchange database after restoring filer from tape. That is what SME effectively does for you.
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With best regards
Andrey Borzenkov
Senior system engineer
Service operations
We are using SnapManager for Exchange to take snapshot/snapmirror type backups of our Exchange databases, which are stored on iSCSI LUNs on NetApp. We use NetApp's Single Mailbox Restore product to do restores.
This works well, but we would like to migrate the backup data to tape in a way which makes restores (relatively) straightforward, so that we can increase our retention period.
Our tape backup/archive solution is TSM.
Can anyone on this list suggest methods to achieve this? We are considering the TSM Exchange agent, but it seems to duplicate rather than leverage the functionality of SME.
OnTAP version is 7.3.5. We don't have SnapVault licensed.