For those folks with file servers and backup servers / storage
nodes sitting on a SAN...

Since Legato supports directed restores, for an environment
of all Solaris servers, is it feasible to use LUN masking to 
make your volumes viewable to both your file server (read/write)
and your backup server (mounted read only), and have the 
backup server consider these files as it's own? I.E. the
indexes would appear to belong to the backup server, but
in fact you would always do directed restores back to the file
server, since you can only mount the filesystem read/write
on one box to prevent filesystem corruption.

Conceptually, it seems like this could work. Bare metal
recovery might pose a challenge, but for simple SDS mirrored
OS disks, having a root disk ufsdump handy for such scenarios
isn't such a bad thing anyway. I'm more concerned about the
1TB+ data volumes and avoiding the hassle of setting up
single or multi-gigabit data paths to try to keep the tape
drives streaming and the backup windows manageable.

It's basically the same idea as putting your tape library and
file services on the same box connected to the disk, but
without the bad dependencies that creates. Since the backup
server only needs read access to perform the backup (indexes
would be maintained separate from the SAN volumes in question)
what risk (if any) exists in allowing concurrent read/write
and read-only mounts of the same volume on two different Solaris
boxes? Will a SAN switch (assume Brocade) and EMC FC-array
(assume Clariion) even allow it?

 
I apologise in advance for the lengthy disclaimer that will no
doubt be attached to this message.


Regards,

Colin Stuckless 
cstuckless AT petro-canada DOT ca
Unix/G&G Support Specialist






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