Since the 700 series filers only allow one SCSI backup device to be attached to a Filer how is it possible to back up 1TB of data in timely manner. I am talking about backing up in a 8 to 12 hour time frame.
Any ideas would be great.
Thanks, Jason
Jason Middlebrooks Systems Engineer Direct Connect Systems Phone: 770-933-9327x270 2264 Northwest Parkway, Suite I Pager: 888-502-1625 Marietta, GA 30067 Fax: 770-933-9272
Since the 700 series filers only allow one SCSI backup device to be attached to a Filer how is it possible to back up 1TB of data in timely manner. I am talking about backing up in a 8 to 12 hour time frame.
Any ideas would be great.
I think about this question a lot. All day. Sometimes at night, too.
First, there is only one SCSI tape card allowed, but I know we use two drives daisy chained off of that card (no more than 2 drives, but 2 definitely).
My ideas: 1) Break your 1TB into some number of qtrees or subdirectories that you back up. Each night you could back up a 200GB tree (qtrees will give you better dump performance than regular old subtrees).
2) Use incrementals to further reduce the amount of time/tape you need to use. I know management becomes more of a headache, so maybe you want to invest in backup software that supports NDMP.
The time to do an incremental will be significantly less than the time to do a full backup. It will spend about the same amount of time doing the file system traversal as a level 0, but assuming a reasonable rate of file system change - you should be able to save time on the actual data dumping.
3) If you're really gung-ho about getting more than 2 dumps running at a time on a filer, your could use the NDMP 3-way backup functionality to run 2 dumps to a remote filer's tape drives in addition to the 2 dumps running on your local tape drive. Of course, your 3-way backup will tend to be quite a bit slower than a local backup.
Do any of these sound interesting to you?
I know Paul Norman reads these. Any news on supporting more tape adapters, Paul?
Stephen Manley FS Recovery
Yup, guilty, I do read Toasters, but I have to say that storage in general and tapes in particular aren't my area. Now that I have that out of the way, I'd say to expect dual tape cards around Feb/Mar in the next major release.
One minor point, 2 tapes on a single adapter make sense with DLT 7000 that run at 10MB/sec compressed. If you use older technology like the DLT 4000 then 4 or 5 per adapter seem reasonable to me.
The real solution to the tape adapter issue is to get FC-AL tapes. Something that won't happen all that soon, but which we are pushing some of the library vendors to work with us on. At 100 MB/sec dropping a half dozen DLT 7000s on it wouldn't even make it sweat.
Stephen Manley wrote:
Since the 700 series filers only allow one SCSI backup device to be attached to a Filer how is it possible to back up 1TB of data in timely manner. I am talking about backing up in a 8 to 12 hour time frame.
Any ideas would be great.
I think about this question a lot. All day. Sometimes at night, too.
First, there is only one SCSI tape card allowed, but I know we use two drives daisy chained off of that card (no more than 2 drives, but 2 definitely).
My ideas:
- Break your 1TB into some number of qtrees or subdirectories
that you back up. Each night you could back up a 200GB tree (qtrees will give you better dump performance than regular old subtrees).
- Use incrementals to further reduce the amount of time/tape you
need to use. I know management becomes more of a headache, so maybe you want to invest in backup software that supports NDMP.
The time to do an incremental will be significantly less than the time to do a full backup. It will spend about the same amount of time doing the file system traversal as a level 0, but assuming a reasonable rate of file system change - you should be able to save time on the actual data dumping.
- If you're really gung-ho about getting more than 2 dumps running at
a time on a filer, your could use the NDMP 3-way backup functionality to run 2 dumps to a remote filer's tape drives in addition to the 2 dumps running on your local tape drive. Of course, your 3-way backup will tend to be quite a bit slower than a local backup.
Do any of these sound interesting to you?
I know Paul Norman reads these. Any news on supporting more tape adapters, Paul?
Stephen Manley FS Recovery
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Jason Middlebrooks -
Paul Norman -
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