"Graham C. Knight" wrote:
We've used NDMP without any of the problems you have mentioned using Netbackup. We did have the same problems when using BudTool. We also use Netbackup to back up several filers using NFS mounts. We do this in the case of a filer that does not have a direct connected tape drive. It works fine over NFS, but is easily twice as slow as a direct connected DLT7000 tape drive (using a 100tx interface). Also, keep in mind that if you have any ACL's on the files they are lost when backed up via NFS. With netbackup we are able to backup filers using NDMP or NFS. We also back up Solaris, IRIX, HP-UX, and Windows NT. Standard disclaimers apply, i don't work for veritas, or hold any of their stock - just a satisfied customer, YMMV, etc. etc.
I had a DLT4000 drive attached to my filers (an F540 & an F330) and was backing them up via NDMP with BudTool. When I replaced the F540 with an F740, I couldn't move the tape over, as F740 had a different SCSI setup, so we bagan backing it up across a dedicated 100Mb FD link to our SGI Origin 2000. We found it to be substantially faster than what the F540 could do to tape, and it got rid of the NDMP hassles. Mind you, we are not backing it up over NFS, but using BudTool's dump.NetApp class with NDMP turned off on the filer, so we're still using the filer's dump and restore, which means we don't lose any ACLs.
Yesterday, after upgrading it to 5.2.2P1, I tried backing my F330 up across the network in the same manner as my F740, and found it to be incredibly faster. It takes BudTool, via NDMP, to a local drive, 16+ hours to back up a 12GB directory, but I can back it up, using the same dump and restore, over the net to my SGI, in 1 hour and 43 minutes. The SGI is writing the data to yet another DLT4000, so it would appear that the filers are the bottleneck - that they write to tape horribly slow. So, I don't think I want to do that any more - not when flinging it across my net gives me such a huge speed up.
So, what I'm looking for is a backup solution that would let me continue using the filer's dump/restore, but to a tape drive on another system, as I'm not ready to replace my perfectly working DLT4000's with something else yet. BudTool let's me do that, but so far it doesn't look like anything else does.
And then, of course, I need to back up those other platforms I mentioned before.
-ste