NDMP was much faster for total throughput for us when compared to a full backup.

Remember what is backed up via NDMP must be restored via NDMP.  So for you DR 
plan you need to ensure you have a NetApp device to restore to at your DR site.

Make sure you run some restore tests and see how you restore to an alternate 
NAS filer.  Remember you can pick alternate location and then browse to a 
windows share somewhere.

The incremental restore from a NDMP backup works as advertised.

The bests advice I can give is the most practical, make sure you run a bunch of 
backup and restore tests.

Curtis Stewart <Curtis.Stewart AT LAWSON DOT COM> wrote:
Everyone,

I'm about to implement NDMP backups of our NetApp filer and am looking for
tips, gotchas etc...

Currently, we backup the filer using CIFS and a mount point on a Windows
2000 server. The performance of this method is painfully slow. It takes
about 22 hours to complete an incremental backup of the 3.5 million file
system over a 100MB full duplex network. We're hoping the backup and
restore performance will improve significantly with NDMP. I've read
through the Admin Guide a few times and our setup will indeed support NDMP
operations.

I plan to use the TSM server to run the library, and share it between the
NAS and regular TSM operations. The library is a STK L700 with LTO Gen2
Fibre Channel drives (8 of them). Overall the setup directions seem fairly
straight forward. Here are my questions.

1. Am I being overly optimistic? It doesn't seem like it will be that big
a deal.
2. Can I expect a significant backup and restore performance improvement
using NDMP?

Thanks in advance,

Curtis

curtis.stewart AT lawson DOT com


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