Hello,

I know only a few people out there are probably using the Legato Client Pak for Netapp in order to backup their filers, but I figured I'd relate a couple observations I'm seeing with Legato.

I have a number of filers with volumes ranging from 60-250Gb, and saving via a private network to my backup server. The client pak from Legato is a tempermental software pakcage to say the least. It's very dependent on which version of ONTAP you are running (like 5.3.5R2P2), and sometimes causes the connections initiated by the backup server to be refused... for no reason I can see. Anyone else notice this?

Another rather annoying problem is that my save streams to tape seem to unexpectedly terminate for no apparent reason. I'll have a group of saveset running, and they either just exit out completely, or I get messages of inactivity timeouts. I upped my timeout threshhold to 180 minutes, although I would default of 30 would be fine. I'm suspecting that perhaps my larger volumes (200Gb) are somehow failing because of performance issue with the client software on the filer. I've looked over my network stats on the filers (using ifstat), and see a moderate number of dropped frames in receive. I would think there would be more transmit errors.

Anyone else out there notice any weirdness with their client pak??

I don't know if I can wait another 3-5 months for Legato's NDMP solution. They seem to be really behind compared to Veritas. According to Legato, it's going to be at least after December before the NDMP is supported.

trying to avoid going back to NFS-mounted backups....

-Scott