I'm fairly new to this list and so I apologize in advance if this
has been discussed (or beaten to death!) in the past. In the
last couple of months it has become clear to us that
as we increase storage capacity at our site, we're not
going to be able to easily keep up on tape capacity for backups.
We are considering using ATT technology for doing some of our
backups to disk, while continuing to use tape for at least
disaster recovery.

We are currently using NetBackup 3.4 to backup several large SGI
and Sun machines as well as a linux cluster and several NetApp
filers (using NDMP). It's mainly the filers that were going to
have trouble keeping up with. The demand for storage capacity at
our site has grown in leaps and bounds and for the most part we
are using NetApp filers to keep up with it. Not even considering the
problems with long backup and recovery time - the number of tapes
alone is enough that we're looking at alternative backup strategies.

So having said all that, I'm wondering just how common backups to disk
are and what sort of platforms people are using, and of course, just how
well it's working.

Thanks in advance,

Charlene Osborn
Helix Systems Staff
CIT, NIH