With the recent slew of mails about backups this question is timely.
Problem 1 - we're an ADSM shop. We have all the infrastructure set up to run ADSM but until now we've not had filers. Pretty soon, all things being equal, we're going to start a project which might end up as 5TB of filers over 10 heads, in 5 clusters. At the remote site we're thinking of 5 heads with 1TB each as a snapmirror destination. There's plentiful network bandwidth available between the sites.
OK, snapshots will take the bulk of our restore work but there will be the usual 'keep monthly backup for 12 months, yearly for ever (= 7 years in my book)'. Then there's what to do if one breaks (double disk hit / reconstruct failure etc etc - not likely but I'm not betting the bank on it).
Checking with the ADSM folks they think they will have a pretty wholesome NetApp integration by end *next* year. Timely as usual (not).
So what to do? When and if ADSM native support becomes a reality we should use it if possible so its an interim thing we need. How about backups over CIFS (because I will need the security info - NFS doesn't back it up apparently)? I didn't think local tape drives was an option due to the size of each filer (500GB) and then the number of filers (10). I reckon I'd need 4 drives on each filer and then bodies running round changing them. BTW the business requirement will be to get them a service back soonest in case of outage - snapmirror looks like a last resort because it seems a tad awkward to fail back when the primary is repaired.
I've read the NetApp white papers but there doesn't seem to be an ideal solution.
All help gratefully received.
Regards Alan