If anyone has commentary, case studies, examples, of this sort of thing
with Amanda, I could pass them along, posting them, or a summary, to the
SAGE list.
---------------
Chris Hoogendyk
-
O__ ---- Systems Administrator
c/ /'_ --- Biology & Geology Departments
(*) \(*) -- 140 Morrill Science Center
~~~~~~~~~~ - University of Massachusetts, Amherst
<hoogendyk AT bio.umass DOT edu>
---------------
Erdös 4
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [SAGE] Backing up Multi-Terabyte filesystems.
Date: Tue, 08 Jul 2008 14:59:35 -0600
From: Ray Frush <phred AT frii DOT com>
To: SAGE Members Mailing List <sage-members AT usenix DOT org>
We've recently discovered a limitation (design flaw) in the backup
strategy for our NetApp NAS solution at my place of employment.
When we keep our file systems "small" ( 2TB) the NetApp solution works
as promised by all the sales engineers. However, several of our more
recent projects required 16TB of space (for each project), and breaking
them up into 2TB buckets has been problematic. So, we allowed larger
file systems. We discovered, later, that the NetApp backup solution
starts to have problems with space reservation when the file systems
grow beyond 4TB. The NearStore shows over 70% of its capacity as
reserved but unused, and we've run out of capacity. Expanding the
NearStore doesn't solve the problem since most of the space never gets
used, just reserved for use.
We have 3 new projects starting up this month that will eventually need
24-30TB each. Our engineering teams have asked even larger file systems
(8TB) to keep the task of managing file links simplified. Since it's
not clear if NetAPP can address this problem, we've started researching
alternatives.
It occurred to me that members of this community may have already had to
solve this problem, so it would be a good question to ask: How do
(would) you backup several 8TB file systems?
VTL is a possiblity, but the databases created by the backup software
start to become increasingly unwieldy. If you've solved this with VTL,
how did you split out the loads?
Other methods?
I look forward to your creative ideas.
--
Ray Frush
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