On Thu, 8 Feb 2001, Melvin, Grant wrote:
Hi, Hope you don't mind me jumping in on this question. As I see it Legato currently provide 4 ways to backup a NetApp filer:
- BudTool
No opinion, although I've seen positive comments from others on this list.
- NFS
If you have a busy filer or large volumes, it will take a long time. This is the most "reliable" way of backing up a filer.
- NetWorker NetApp Client
Crap product, and not really supported well by Legato at all. It's unstable, the nsrexecd daemons that run on the filer need to be constantly restarted, it only works on select (and outdated) versions of ONTAP, and the save sets can terminate if the volumes sizes run over 100Gb (due to some internal array problem in the s/w)
- NDMP-compliant NetWorker
I have't tried out Legato's NDMP support, but then I'm having basic Networker problems (running 6.0.1) trying to backup my filers.
I've about given up on Legato and have been doing evaluations of Veritas NetBackup software. I've found it to be better than Legato, more robust, stable, and the NDMP work rather well. The only drawback to NDMP, and this isn't Veritas' fauly, is that you cannot have multiple save streams from the filer to the tape unit. NDMP only allows ONE stream from ONE filer. This is a bit of bummer because the DLT drives work better when you have a lot of streams being thrown at it, and if your filesystems on the volume you are backing up are a lot of small files and directories, the save stream from the one NDMP session can be rather anemic.
It will be nice when NDMP allows to have multiple concurrent save streams based on the filesystem and not just the volume. Netapp ONTAP supports mulitple NDMP session per filer, and Veritas can handle multiple streams, just no the protocol that bridges the two.
That's my take on it so far.
-Scott