Robert Loh wrote:

Hi All,

Interesting, knowing that the next trend of NDMP is going into a tape drive
via Ethernet ports, that means there are Ethernet ports on each tape drive
to accept an NDMP stream. Anybody here seem that happen now ? ATL and
Spectralogic as I know off are heading into this direction.

We talked to Netapp about this, before we bought our Spectralogic. The
concept of having an NDMP server directly on the drive is pretty neat.

What they said was, if you have a lot of filers, the GbE-attached NDMP
drives might make sense. But at the same time, if you have that many
filers, you're probably also in the price range for something like a
Netapp R100/R150, which will allow you to consolidate your backups to a
single (slightly cheaper, slower) filer, which you can then back up via
direct-attached FC/SCSI drives.

Where I get the sense this would be useful is if you had a bunch of NDMP
clients that needed backing up, and you didn't want to or couldn't
direct-attach one or more drives to each client via FC or SCSI, and you
had an existing GbE infrastructure to take advantage of.

Obviously netapp is going to be biased towards pushing their solution,
but it makes sense to me in this case. Despite the fact that it is the
only way to effectively back up large netapp filers, NDMP is still
pretty miserable IMHO, and I would seek to minimize the number of NDMP
clients and servers in my environment if I had a choice.


andrew

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