Hello,

Manny's response addressed some key questions that an administrator must answer when designing a backup solution.

Further, one of the benefits of FC is that it provides backup access to storage that is not directly attached to the source data. Therefore, the question of performance on the F630 should not be the only consideration when making you decision.

I do not entirely agree with Prem on the recommended approach for 'keeping things simple'. In fact direct attached SCSI can be more expensive and more complicated to manage.

ATL is scheduled to ship a P3000 library this month that supports NDMP. This library supports GbE interface for each of its 16 DLT drives. Each DLT drive within the library is independent (own IP address & NDMP server) which almost eliminates the possibility of a complete library disaster. GbE is a proven technology that is considered mature.

My recommendation is to centralize you backup using a Library with enough capacity for future scaling. I do not have enough information on your total infrastructure, i.e. FC, SCSI, Ethernet to make a recommendation on what interface this library should use. This information is necessary to calculate you total cost of ownership for a selected solution.

Regards, Michael.

-----Original Message----- From: Manny Kaiser [mailto:mkaiser@mmcnet.com] Sent: Monday, December 04, 2000 3:42 PM To: 'Oliver Ho' Cc: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: Re: Backup solution for 2x F840, 2xF630

Hi,

I would go on and comment, that it is good practice to distant your filers from your backup system, thus a fibre solution is preferred. Today management overhead of one large or several small libraries is not too big when using Veritas, thus I don't think this should be a major consideration. An additional consideration is making sure that the fibre at both ends are compatible. I definitely agree that with snapshots, the biggest concern of a backup system is disaster recovery, thus recovery time is an essential consideration - how long can your business be down until you recover a volume, a filer, or all your filers. The number of drives, the speed that they can actually restore data and of course your volume sizes are key factors in determining a backup system. Manny

"Traitel, Eyal" wrote:

Personally, I'd go for the large library because of the price, easier management for you, better scalability and more features probably... You will have more flexibility as well...

On number of drives - consider restore times as well... Eyal.

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-----Original Message----- From: Oliver Ho [mailto:oliver@interq.or.jp] Sent: Monday, December 04, 2000 10:22 AM To: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: Backup solution for 2x F840, 2xF630

Dear all,

I have been given a task of designing a Netapps backup solution for my network.

We have 2x F840 2x F630 and various unix servers.

Approx 1TB of data for the netapps.

Various Vendors have informed me that the F630 are too slow for FibreChannel.

Solution 1 One VERY HUGE Library with 2x FC for F840 and 2x SCSI for F630 card mixture for the netapps 4 Tape drives FC Switch for F840s

Solution 2 Library with 2x FC for F840, two tape drives FC Switch for F840s Library with 2x SCSI for F630, two tape drives

Solution 3 Three small library with SCSI for each F630 One Library with 2x FC with two tape drives FC Switch for F840s.

The funny thing is Solution 1 is the cheapest, then 2,3. I guess its because it mean more hardware.

Can someone give me some pointers. These are all very expensive solutions. I have heard that some ppl have used Gigabit ethernet and dumped via NDMP.

We are thinking of using Veritas Netbackup for backups. I have heard that you can get some kind of SCSI->FC conversion, so I can connect to whatever FC connected library I may have.

What would you do in my case?

TIA

Regards Oliver Ho.