Hi Richard,
 
> I was wonder if I could get some feed back on NDMP.  We have 2 networker
> servers ( both running 7.3.2 )  on Solaris 9 boxes.  We backup mostly
> Solaris client and about  dozen windows servers.  Windows people want to
> do a NAS and use NDMP to back it up.  I had heard in older version of
> Networker ( 6.x.x versions ) that there were some issues with NDMP ( one
> you could not relocate to another file system ).  Do some of these
> problems still exist or has it got better ?  I don't fell I can really
> trust EMS's literature so I thought I would ask the group and get the
> real story

I think NDMP would be best understood if we expand the acronym to cover what
many people find:

Never
Does
Much
Protection

NAS is, in theory, a great system which allows for system and storage
administrators to allocate storage with little fuss. However, the cost of
this is the complexity of managing and protecting the back-end storage.

While NDMP backups have considerably improved over the last 3-4 years, it's
still a band-aid, not a cure. In short, NAS has popularity due to the "ease
of management", which is something the NAS vendors are very quick to point
out during the selling process. What they usually fail to point out is the
challenges faced in getting reliable backups and recoveries.

The other thing I don't like about NAS is that it ties you to the vendor
once you start backing it up; you can't for instance recover a NetApp backup
onto an EMC NAS head, or vice-versa. I.e., NAS is one of the most successful
products for achieving "vendor lock-in" I've seen. Once most companies have
a particular flavour of NAS deployed, and backups committed via NDMP,
they're stuck with it "forever" in order to be able to recover data.

Cheers,

Preston.

-- 
http://www.anywebdb.com
http://enterprise.backup.googlepages.com

To sign off this list, send email to listserv AT listserv.temple DOT edu and 
type "signoff networker" in the body of the email. Please write to 
networker-request AT listserv.temple DOT edu if you have any problems with this 
list. You can access the archives at 
http://listserv.temple.edu/archives/networker.html or
via RSS at http://listserv.temple.edu/cgi-bin/wa?RSS&L=NETWORKER