Probably the best question is what exactly do you want these backups for?
To be able to restore files people mistakenly delete/corrupt? For full-on
disaster recovery? For long-term archiving?
I think for the first one, various online or near-offline solutions like
you've mentioned (ndmp to another server, etc) are probably fine, but then
you could probably do just as well by just relying on snapshots and keep it
simple.
My personal opinion, which others might disagree with, is that for disaster
recovery and *especially* for long-term archiving, you really need good
offline storage like tapes. Something you can have shipped to a storage
facility buried in a mountain somewhere. With enough money you could have
multiple netapps around the country/world with snapmirror or somesuch
replicating between them, which is great for DR too, but in the end I'm just
not comfortable without something offline to fall back on.
Imo the best solution is good backup software and a large automated tape
library, but it's not going to be cheap. Even just the tapes can be a huge
expense.
We're still doing backups over NFS here, largely because when we tried doing
NDMP a few years ago it just did not seem ready for prime time, we had too
many problems. I'm very much interested in trying NDMP again though, as
backing up over NFS is not the most efficient solution.
I admit though, I've been in this business a long time and I'm a bit
old-fashioned. Other people might be more comfortable than I am with
relying entirely on hard drives for disaster recovery.
--
Michael W. Sphar - IS&T - Lead Systems Administrator
SMBU Engineering Support Services, BMC Software
-----Original Message-----
From: Constantin Bogomolnyi [mailto:const@carpediem.fr]
Sent: Tuesday, May 17, 2005 1:32 PM
To: Fox, Adam
Cc: Constantin Bogomolnyi; toasters@mathworks.com
Subject: Re: best backup for netapps
Yep ,
i was ready to bet on it , but how do you want us to backup big netapps ?
i have around 2T of videos so it will take _a_lot_ of tapes , and time
to backup this .
I can always setup a linux nfs server and use ndmp to backup it by
a dedicated giga card , buts its a lot of complications .
I think backup is a real problem with current huge volumes and cheap ide
drives are cheaper than tapes (or close to the tapes) .
Cb
On Tue, May 17, 2005 at 11:07:41AM -0700, Fox, Adam wrote:
> The filer probably will not accept and it is certainly not supported to
> hook up any other
> RAID arrays to a filer. There is no device support for it.
>
> -- Adam Fox
> adamfox@netapp.com
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Constantin Bogomolnyi [mailto:const@carpediem.fr]
> Sent: Tuesday, May 17, 2005 1:42 PM
> To: toasters@mathworks.com
> Subject: best backup for netapps
>
> Hello,
>
> I'm wondering what is the best backup system for saving big netapps we
> have tried alot of solutions , but we finished by running 3 sets of
> netapp in snapmirror so A(master) replicates to B and C (slaves) all
> have now raid_dp enabled and spare around . So we have realtime B and C
> backups (we may cluster A and B) .
>
> But as its quite expensive "backup" i'm looking for some classic backup
> with tapes for example but i know from the past that tapes can be big
> pain to manage (specialy as we have around 2.5T of data on A)
>
> Anybody have some "tape backup" that realy works ?
>
> sub question : anybody have tried to attach a cheap ide raid shelf to
> scsi port of the netapp and use it as backup ?
>
> today its cheap to have 14x300 gig ide disk array with scsi port , so it
> could be better than tapes if its directly attached to the netapp , nan
> ?
>
>
> Best regards
> cb
>
>
Sphar, Mike