Hi,
After reading this thread, it seems that ndmp is the way to go and most of the incompatibilities between various vendors have been taken care off. I am quoting some from parts from this thread below and at the end I am putting my most recent experience with ndmp which was today itself.
"Shaun Erickson" wrote:
Because of the frequent upgrades, (which continue to happen, but for other reasons) we frequently ran into problems because of incompatibilities between NetApp's implementation of NDMP and BudTool's. Then, when we'd try to get support, we were always told that the version of Ontap we were running wasn't certified with BudTool, so it was always a major pain to get support. To be fair, BudTool broke NDMP on occasion, as well, with their upgrades. The end result was the same, however.
"Melvin, Grant" wrote:
I believe this effort has paid off and that we have fixed our issues in 5.2.*. For 5.3 we ported the NDMP server to run in the Java Virtual Machine & support V3. Results so far have shown some bugs, reported on toasters, but these have been fixed and we have a very stable product.
I am running 5.2.2P1 (recommended release from netapp) on my toaster. For backups I am using budtool with ndmp for my toaster. I upgraded my budtool installation from 4.5 to 4.6 with patches 1,3,4,5,10,11,14,17. The upgrade broke the file history creation/merge part only for my toaster which is using ndmp. For other file systems (Sun/Irix) file history is working fine. I called Intelliguard (now Legato) for support. First thing the support person does is to point me to their certification matrix ( http://www.iguard.com/products/certmatrix1.html ) which does not have any mention of ONTAP 5.2.2 and hence it is not supported. The person tells me that I am out of luck unless I run a supported version. I pointed the person to the piece of code which was broken, and responsible for the problem, the support person agreed to look at that but at the same told me that no change to budtool code can be made for an *Unsupported* ONTAP release which coincidentally is the **Recommended release** from netapp. I guess, that speaks a lot about **COORDINATION**.
The choice I have is to either upgrade to an early access relase (5.3.1), which I won't do on a production toaster, or move away from ndmp.
rajeev