Currently about 700GB's using dump/restore on 6 F330's and F540 and 2 F630's.
Judicious snapshotting, decent DLT stackers directly attached to the filers and a reliable admin host mean all but the one F540 (with 200GB totally filled) easily backup overnight - the F540 finishes mid-morning.
We've spoken with folk from NetApp who seem to be doing exciting things in the labs, related to faster backups (hopefully more manageable ones, with fast restores too, but I'll take what I can get).
Veritas claim they'll support NDMP in one of the next two releases (they do two per year).
We're trying to decide upon a backup solution across a large slice of our infrastructure, several flavours of Unix, maybe NT as well, and the filers too (for preference)...Legato and Openvision are still in the running, but Legato has two major demerits: no planned NDMP support and they change the atime values on files during backup and don't rest them! Which is infuriating because backup isn't 'normal use' and you need to know the age of files to be able to make sensible decisions to manage them!
2p or not 2p, yah, let's break the bank.
On Nov 13, 9:02, sirbruce@ix.netcom.com wrote:
Subject: Re: backing up large filers On 11/13/97 00:02:12 you wrote:
dump makes for a fairly poor backup management solution. Ever try to maintain ~30 filers with around 600GB? We kinda found that our home grown scripts we're scaling to where we needed to be and found it increasinly harder to manage the whole mess.
Well, I admit, not 30. :) But hundreds of gigabytes, yes. The only real problem in terms of scalability was long restore times; that could be solved by breaking the backups into smaller chunks. But with snapshots the need for restores was very rare; I could see how this could easly be a more frequent need in a different environment.
Bruce
-- End of excerpt from sirbruce@ix.netcom.com
+--- In our lifetime, mds46523@ggr.co.uk (Simmons Mr M D) wrote: | | Judicious snapshotting, decent DLT stackers directly attached to the filers and | a reliable admin host mean all but the one F540 (with 200GB totally filled) | easily backup overnight - the F540 finishes mid-morning.
We have found that snapshots make a wonderful alternative to single file restores. We have folks that update content for web sites 24x7 and there is a delta of about 2GB per day. So, after 2 weeks, 8 days and 6 hours of snapshots, we use quite a bit of space on this :)
As for stackers directly attached to the filers, what have folks found that works? When we first tried this (long ago with an ADIC DLT 2500xt "stacker"), we found that the stacker mechanism was quite lousy and tended to hang. Thus we had to reboot the filer to "un-hang" the stacker. I have stayed away from diretly connected drives since.
I would love to be able to attach a stacker back onto the filer.
Our main problem with single drives is that our filers are 2500 miles away and it is hard to coordinate tape swaps (should we have a single directly attached to the filer.
Alexei
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Alexei Rodriguez -
mds46523＠ggr.co.uk