This is the second flashback to one of my former jobs that Richard has
given me this week.

A Fortune 50 retailer built a special infrastructure to back up their
Teradata. As you say, it had to be a Windows server for the client. In this
case, I think it was six storage agents. The storage pool was GPFS-managed
shares off of a Coraid storage array connected by special purpose Ethernet
to the storage agents.

It was rather fragile. If GPFS or any of the storage agents had an issue,
we had to shutdown and restart the whole set in a very specific order. We
also were only doing backups of the Teradata once a week. It was originally
built for a single backup before a massive upgrade, but months later, they
asked for weekly backups, and we tripled the size of the Coraid array -- at
the Teradata team's cost, of course.

We were a Datadomain shop, but at that time, we doubted that our DDRs were
fast enough to meet the throughput needs. I'm sure DDRs are faster now than
they were then.

I'd rather do queries against the CONTENTS table (on a 6.3 or later server)
than work with that configuration again.

Nick


On Thu, Feb 5, 2015 at 8:54 AM, Rhodes, Richard L. <
rrhodes AT firstenergycorp DOT com> wrote:

> We purchased a Teradata.  Since there are way too many
> questions about where this project is going, for right
> now we got a basic backup working as they startup this project.
>
> For right now we have this setup:
> - BAR server runs Windows (we wanted Linux, but for Teradata
>      TSM support requires Windows)
> - It sends data to a TSM server via a 1GB Ethernet on our regular network.
> - The TSM server writes the data to a NFS/DataDomain share.
> - We are filling the 1GB ethernet pipe (110MB/s), so this
>      is running as fast as possible.
>
> As the needs develop and become clear, we will have to greatly gear
> up backups for much higher throughput.  Some of the options we have
> talked about are:
>
> - Put a StorageAgent on the BAR server for direct tape drive access.
> - Put a StorageAgent on the BAR server to a DataDomain VTL.
> - A TSM server directly on the BAR server driving a 10G ethernet NFS
>      connection to a DataDomain.
> - A TSM server directly on the BAR server driving a DataDomain VTL.
> - The same thing we do now but using a 10G ethernet connection between
>      the BAR server and the TSM server.
>      - TSM server write to DD on 10g/NFS.
>      - TSM server write to tape.
>      - TSM server write to DD VTL.
> - Don't use TSM - switch to NetBackup, use DataDomain with BOOST, and some
>      newer Teredata backup sftw (that doesn't support TSM).
> - ?????
>
> Q)  If anyone out there is backing up a Teradata, I'd be interested to
>     hear about your setup and experience.
>
> Our concern is creating a big one-off system that will be difficult to
> maintain long term.  For example, we have no experience for storage agent
> and tape on Windows.
>
>
> Thanks
>
> Rick
>
>
>
>
>
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