Hi,

Has anyone found a "good" solution to backing up large filers?

No....

Someone convinced me that this ndmp thing was the way to go and I bought into the whole BudTool scheme (since they're the only ones supporting ndmp). I have an issue with that too - only one vendor.

NetApp tried with us too...

However, it's been nothing but a disaster and I'm looking for something far better. We've gotten the impression that no one at PDC has bothered to test BudTool with large filers with BreeceHill stackers (PDC and NetApp recommeneded these to us). There appears to be a general lack of interopibility. And finger pointing between Network Appliance and PDC.

Right now we have an issue that keeps rebooting our filers every few days.

Don't even talk about restoring data... as part of our general backup policy, we do periodic restores. I believe the wording from PDC was something to the effect that BudTool is a backup management software and not geared towards restores. Suffice it to say that we rarely have a successful restore.

I'm basically fishing for alternative backup solutions. We have three F540s with ~100GB disk and about 20 other boxes with ~50GB or so each, all code development and all needs to be backed up.

Any ideas? We're all pretty frustrated at the lack of a solid backup solution from Network Appliance. Hell, I'd go for something proprietary so long as it worked!

My best solution is based on using Legato Networker 5.02, running on Solaris 2.6 2 CPUx 200MHz Ultra with 256 MByte of memory, and 2 x 100Mbit ethernet interfaces against the filers.The tape drives are 2 x DLT7000 in a 10 slot jukebox.

The filers contains about 5 million files, using 192 Gbyte of data.

Occasional restores never failed us, online file indexes has 1 month of history. A restore of a single file usually takes about 5 minutes, including overhead in mounting tapes.

A disaster recovery takes *far* to long, but the potential for restoring files to something other than NetApp is promising, I can restore a full saveset of 100GByte in 6 hours ( to /dev/null, or scanning in files not contained in the online index)

Needless to say, we are looking into something else.....

Best Regards,

Lars Wean