Jeff, FYI, Workstation Solutions' Quick Restore package also allows all of the configuration options that Budtools allowed. If you want to take a look at their stuff, the url is www.worksta.com You're right that Veritas requires the drives in the library to be either directly attached to a filer, or attached to another filer. On the second issue, each F760 is able to support up to four tape drives, an F740 can support 2 and our newer F840 can support up to 8, so it depends on the model of filer you have. If your tape library supports splitting the internal bus, by daisy chaining a couple of drives together and cabling them directly to a filer, we have customers who are doing this, using Veritas to control the robotics. A backup package is required to control the robotics because we have no robotics control capability built-in to DataOnTap. Hope this helps.
-----Original Message----- From: Jeffrey Krueger [mailto:jkrueger@qualcomm.com] Sent: Tuesday, October 10, 2000 7:04 PM To: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: Veritas NetBackup + NDMP == Doh!!
We are currently using BudTool and implementing Veritas NetBackup as a replacement. We want to use NDMP to dump the filer's data off to a NetBackup server (big honkin' sun box w/ lots of library enclosed DLT7k's). Veritas says that in 3.2, they only support NDMP dump/restore to filer attached tape. In 3.4 they claim to support NDMP 3-way dump/restore from one NetApp to another NetApp with locally attached tape. So we are double hosed. Of course, BudTool effortlessly does NDMP to the filer attached tape, 3-way to another filer attached tape, and apparently right back into the BudTool host which is what we want with NetBackup.
Anyone else trying to do the same thing? Any other ideas short of sitting on Veritas?
On another topic entirely, does anyone have experience attaching many (2-4) DLT7k's per NetApp and using them as a backup tape server via 3-way NDMP? Something tells me that ONTAP and the filer are not designed to handle this well, but we'd like to see if anyone else is trying this. A possible solution for us would be using two or three filers with 4 drives attached to each as a pool of dump/restore servers for the other 20 or 30 filers.
Thanks!!
-- Jeff
-- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jeff Krueger E-Mail: jeff@qualcomm.com Senior Engineer Phone: 858-651-6709 NetApp Filers / UNIX Infrastructure Fax: 858-651-6627 QUALCOMM, Inc. IT Engineering Web: www.qualcomm.com
On Wed, 11 Oct 2000, Cormier, Darleen wrote:
Veritas requires the drives in the library to be either directly attached to a filer, or attached to another filer. On the second issue, each F760 is able to support up to four tape drives, an F740 can support 2 and our newer F840 can support up to 8, so it depends on the model of
Hrm. I didn't know that. I guess hooking up a larger Adic Scalar 1000 with more than 4 drives to a filer would be a waste of time then, if it only supports 4 drives.
This is where allowing NDMP to dump to a remote tape library is very important, because systems such as I support require more than 4 drives and having local tapes drives on filers is not really feasible.
-Scott
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Scott T. Mikusko The stars are laughing at us, as we Systems Engineer crawl on and on across this antheap.... Concentric Network Corporation -XTC Internet Guerilla -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
. . . This is where allowing NDMP to dump to a remote tape library is very important, because systems such as I support require more than 4 drives and having local tapes drives on filers is not really feasible.
-Scott
I think things are headed toward the use of SAN-connected tape drives and libraries for this type of setup. The backup software tells the SAN switch to connect up the appropriate number of drives to the backup client (NetApp), and then uses NDMP to initiate the backup on the client, using "direct attached" tape drives. When that backup is done, you "direct attach" the drives to the next client.
I think Veritas and NetApp claim to support something like this, but only with certain SAN switching equipment. If you've got SCSI drives (as opposed to FC), then you'll need a SCSI-to-FC converter while you're at it.
Heck, some libraries (ATL, for one) are becoming available with NDMP servers right in them, ethernet interface included. Dunno where you put the file history or tape indexes, but it's getting interesting.
Speaking of NAS & tape libraries, does anybody have any experience with the Grau Data "Infinistore Virtual Disk System" (www.graudata.com)? It's apparently a NAS box with a RAID cache in front of a tape library.
The brief article I saw in Server/Workstation Expert magazine mentioned that an "entry level" system starts at around $100k, so I didn't read beyond that (:-). We sure wish NetApp had something like this, since somewhere around 80% of our filer's capacity is tied up in files that haven't been accessed in a year or more.
Regards,
-
Cormier, Darleen -
Marion Hakanson -
Scott Mikusko