Our current and preferred setup (by the Oracle DBA's) is backup to disk and
then clone to tape.
We tried staging to ensure that our disk device doesn't fill up during long
weekend and holidays, but our Oracle DBA's got used to 'quick restores'
and refresh using the savesets from the disk backup device instead of the
cloned tapes. It is much faster to restore from disk than tapes not to mention
if your clone tapes are already sent to offsite storage. The size of our disk
device allows us to save at least a week's worth of incremental and full
Unix/Oracle backups, so it doesn't matter if you need to restore from day 1 to
the last day of the week, they are all in just 1 big storage - no need to do
volume search, mounting and unmounting.
regards,
Librado
>>> swhitby AT DATAPROTECTORS.CO DOT UK 19/Jul/2006 1:53 am >>>
The oldest VTL that I know of is FalconStor (going on product maturity etc. -
www.falconstor.com). No personal recommendation, just pointing it out. There
are also VTLs from EMC and others. The benefit with the EMC one is that it
will (not sure whether through NW or simply on its own) clone to a physical
tape library attached to the back end. I believe it will require NW 7.3.1 or
you may have to wait for 7.3.2 for that to function though, and there will
still be product maturity issues for some time to come.
Personal experience with the CDL were good in terms of response times. Tape
loads and positioning are immediate, but I didn't try something like an Oracle
recover. Remember, these things are designed to work EXACTLY like tapes;
including reading from a specific position. To recover your data quickly when
you have a new saveset recovery start from a point on tape before the current
one, you're still likely to have to wait until the "tape" can reposition to
start streaming that data off.
Unless someone knows different.....
Cheers,
Stuart.
________________________________
From: Legato NetWorker discussion on behalf of Werth, Dave
Sent: Wed 19-Jul-06 01:12
To: NETWORKER AT LISTSERV.TEMPLE DOT EDU
Subject: Re: [Networker] Cloning from Disk
Thanks to Preston, Stuart, Librado, & Darren for there replies regarding
VTL's.
We have a relatively simple Networker configuration here, 8 Windows servers,
1 Windows workstation & 1 Solaris server. The only BSM we use is for MS
Exchange. A full backup takes about 7.5 hours and another 7 hours for
cloning (around 300 GB backed up). The full Exchange backup takes about 3
hours including cloning (60 GB).
The main reason we're looking at disk backup is to speed up recovery. About
a year ago we had a component fail on the RAID array on our main file
server. It took IBM 4 days to find the problem then it took us 1+ day to
restore the array from AIT-2 tapes. (We now have AIT-4 drives which are 4
times as fast).
So the impetus to look at disk backup is to improve that restore time to
near the of speed disk to disk transfers. If we could achieve that with VTL
technology I think that would be the way to go for us. We would probably
back up to the VTL then clone that to a tape for off-site storage. We don't
need to keep more than about 5 weeks of backups at one time.
Spectralogic (the vendor of our current library) has an interesting VTL
product they call RXT. The disks are removable RAID packs (RAID 0, 1, 0+1,
or 5). It's probably kind of spendy but might be just what we need.
Thanks again, Dave.
David Werth
Garmin AT, Inc
Salem, Oregon
dave.werth AT garmin DOT com
-----Original Message-----
From: Darren Dunham [mailto:ddunham AT TAOS DOT COM]
Sent: Tuesday, July 18, 2006 9:32 AM
To: NETWORKER AT LISTSERV.TEMPLE DOT EDU
Subject: Re: [Networker] Cloning from Disk
> The VTLs also have their problems, mostly down to a lack of maturity
> on the software side.
*bing* *bing*
Strong agreement. 2-3 years ago, I was not happy with the disk backup
features in either Networker or Netbackup. I felt that they hadn't been
used heavily by enough admins. I would have gone with a "simpler" model
with VTL (it had some advantages of reducing modifications in the backup
configuration as well).
After greater use of the disk backup mechanisms and putting up with bugs
and problems of a VTL, I'd now start any redesign with a preference for
keeping it within the backup product rather than introducing a separate
piece.
--
Darren Dunham ddunham AT taos DOT com
Senior Technical Consultant TAOS http://www.taos.com/
Got some Dr Pepper? San Francisco, CA bay area
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