----- Original Message ----- From: Brian Tao taob@risc.org To: Bruce Sterling Woodcock sirbruce@ix.netcom.com Cc: toasters@mathworks.com Sent: Wednesday, February 16, 2000 5:07 PM Subject: Re: Centralized backup of multiple filers
On Wed, 16 Feb 2000, Bruce Sterling Woodcock wrote:
Have you considered Netapp's recently announced ability to share backup devices between filers through a FC SAN using Legato and a Vixel switch?
Yes, but folks on my team have had suboptimal experiences withLegato software and Vixel hardware in the past, so I'm not too excited about it.
That's too bad. I'm hoping it catches on. Maybe Netapp needs to support more than just Vixel?
Personally I think you're spending a lot of money just to make backups faster, and I'm not even sure how much time that saves, since you have to spend time to do the rsync over the net first, and then do the local backup from the UNIX box.
My thinking is that with slow clients, throughput to a disk devicewill be faster than to a tape device, because of tape start/stop overhead. Therefore, the backup window (as far as the Netapps are concerned) is shortened.
I would agree that individual filers could be available sooner, sure. Personally I don't think the load hit is so great that your backup window has to be very small, but you say you run them pretty hot, so YMMV.
Data from local disk can then be sent to tape outside of the normal backup window. You do end up with two useful copies of your data, so the time spent moving data around isn't wasted.
Right; my point though was once you add this time into the equation, the overall backup time until the data is "safe" on a tape could be not much less than backing up from the filer directly.
Bruce