Networker

Re: [Networker] DR qeustions

2009-10-30 05:14:24
Subject: Re: [Networker] DR qeustions
From: Conrad Macina <conrad.macina AT PFIZER DOT COM>
To: NETWORKER AT LISTSERV.TEMPLE DOT EDU
Date: Fri, 30 Oct 2009 05:09:21 -0400
EMC has a product called Autostart that allegedly can be used to promote a
NetWorker storage node to a server when the server fails. I haven't looked
at it in years -- since the Legato days -- and even then only at the
"glossy" level. But the sales dude said it could do that, more-or-less
seamlessly.

IIRC, completed save sets were remembered as completed and in-progress
backups had to be restarted manually. But if you had a client with a hundred
save sets in a savegroup and 99 of them had completed successfully at the
time of the crash, when you restarted the savegroup it would repeat the
backups of the 99 save sets.

It occurred to me at the time that you could probably do the same trick with
any standard clustering software and shared disk. As Tim notes, we don't see
a lot of posts to the list from people with clustered NetWorker
environments, so I don't think there is a perception of value.

Conrad Macina
Pfizer, Inc.




On Thu, 29 Oct 2009 19:18:57 -0500, Tim Mooney <Tim.Mooney AT NDSU DOT EDU> 
wrote:

>In regard to: [Networker] DR qeustions, Matthew Powell said (at 10:25am on...:
>
>> I have a Networker 7.4 environment with only 1 backup server. I was
>> curious if I set up a Storage Node would that be able to take over for
>> the primary if I have a hardware failure on the primary server? Or would
>> it be easier just to set up another backup server that points to the
>> same disk space? Thanks for your time.
>
>Since no one else has responded, I'll take a stab at this.  If others
>respond and contradict anything I say, they're right and I'm wrong.  ;-)
>
>There's no easy way to promote a storage node to be a full NetWorker
>server.  You would have to go through exactly the same procedure (the full
>DR procedure) to get your NetWorker server back, whether you're starting
>with a box that's already a storage node or you're just starting with some
>random server.
>
>The only advantages to promoting a storage node to a full server would be
>
>- you already have most of the NetWorker bits and most (probably all) of
>   the software prereqs installed.
>
>- you have a system that has I/O connectivity to some backup media and/or
>   jukebox.
>
>There is one possible disadvantage that I can think of to promoting
>your storage node: you no longer have a separate storage node.  That means
>that once you've finished the DR procedure, you may (I'm not certain on
>this) also need to reconfigure any client resources that were configured
>to use the storage node to now use the server (even though it's the same
>system, with the same hostname).  This may add some complexity that you
>really don't want to have to deal with during a DR.
>
>My preference would be to leave the storage node alone and do DR on some
>other capable server, if I were in your shoes.  There are of course
>clustering options you might consider and maybe they work very well with
>NetWorker, but it's fairly rare to see someone post to the list with a
>clustered NetWorker server config so I'm skeptical of the
>clustering+NetWorker server option at this point.  I would love to see
>someone give convincing evidence that it's easy and painless to set up and
>manage.
>
>Tim
>--
>Tim Mooney                                             Tim.Mooney AT ndsu DOT 
>edu
>Enterprise Computing & Infrastructure                  701-231-1076 (Voice)
>Room 242-J6, IACC Building                             701-231-8541 (Fax)
>North Dakota State University, Fargo, ND 58105-5164
>
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