Please excuse my ignorance, we're just about to buy a Filer or two but I don't have any hands-on experience yet.
We're looking at a first filer with about 2.5TB and my understanding is we could not do a tape backup overnight with only a single-drive tape subsystem. At this time, we would prefer not to invest in something like Legato to intelligently drive a multi-drive jukebox like the Spectralogic series, though this should be able to dump the full capacity overnight. ("enterprise backup" is down the road).
Instead, I was considering getting a second NetApp (probably refurb with transferable license) and backing up the first to the second. This seems surprisingly cost-effective. (I'd love to do SnapMirror but it's surprisingly cost-prohibitive.)-:
Is there a way to natively run dumps from one NetApp to another without Legato-ish middleware? without an intermediary client box doing NFS/CIFS mounts? (we need to preserve both filesystem attributes).
Is this a plain stooopid idea? Any better ones?
Again, I'm hoping to avoid jumping into something Legato-esque at this point -- and just do something cheap and reusable like another NetApp -- because we'll be looking into a more comprehensive backup solution later.
Thanks, and sorry for my ignorance. Pointers to docs welcomed.