Networker

Re: [Networker] Pro's and Con's of NDMP

2007-04-02 03:22:00
Subject: Re: [Networker] Pro's and Con's of NDMP
From: "Krishnan, Ramamurthy" <Ramamurthy.Krishnan AT KPMG.CO DOT UK>
To: NETWORKER AT LISTSERV.TEMPLE DOT EDU
Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2007 08:19:59 +0100
We have been using NDMP backups for quite a while.. And it has been
largely trouble free.. Not so straight forward to configure, but once
set it is butter smooth.  Bear in mind the below, if you are setting up
NDMP backups of any NAS

- Make sure you get the device compatibility (in terms of connectivity
type, I/O card to be used, firmware, any device specific config files on
the NAS box etc.,) certified by the NAS vendor for NetWorker.

- In the "Application Information" attribute, do not specify any options
that are not mentioned in the NetWorker manual.

- Once setup, test large and small backups and recoveries.  Make sure
you can read from every device.

- Make sure you keep monitoring the index file system on the backup
server, as I've always felt NDMP backups take up more index space.

-----Original Message-----
From: EMC NetWorker discussion [mailto:NETWORKER AT LISTSERV.TEMPLE DOT EDU] On
Behalf Of Preston de Guise
Sent: 30 March 2007 23:28
To: NETWORKER AT LISTSERV.TEMPLE DOT EDU
Subject: Re: [Networker] Pro's and Con's of NDMP

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

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