G D Geen wrote:
Alexander Strauss wrote:
Jeff, Glen,
- Netapps are impossible to back up
Not so. There are many ways to backup a filer. The fasted by far is direct attached SCSI though. If investing in large filers, one might consider the use of DLT for backups.
In a larger environment you probably don't want to backup each fileserver separately with an attached DLT. And as NetApp doesn't support a reasonable NDMP version which allows backup over the net the only way to do a central backup is through NFS - not a very smart solution.
backing up large volumes across an NFS mount is highly inefficient. We are using a Storage Tech tape silo and Veritas backup solution. With the large tape system, we are able to directly connect DLT 7000 to the filers. When implementing high end storage solutions one must also implement high end backup solutions.
Correctly. We didn't consider to attach our robot directly to the NetApps because of the following reasons:
- central backup (AML/J w/700DLT slots) of a distributed server environment does not allow direct SCSI cabling.
- hard backup drive assignment (vs. automatic, S/W controlled drive assignement) is not efficient and thus not cost effective.
- desaster recovery capability (strategic TI goal) does not allow to have the robot in the same room as the fileservers - and SCSI lines are limited.
So we desided to do a NFS backup of the NetApps until (hopefully) a new NDMP client will allow a reasonable backup over the network. By the way, in another mail I got the answer, that backups to a remote drive are much faster - we want to do this in a similar way once the NDMP client is ready...
Interestingly, there was brief discussion on toasters a few weeks ago about slow backups to a local SCSI tape, when the drive was made remote the backups went MUCH faster. It seems that the additional buffering provided by the network allowed the tape drive to stream better than when it was attached locally.