Ed
Its not really about SAN reliability. Its about the best
practice to locate the catalog. Is storing the catalog on a Production SAN with
Production Data the best method, or would it be feasible to locate the catalog
"outside" the production SAN.
Difference in recovery could vary. For example, if there
was a SAN outage, failure (whatever you want to define it), and production Data
is lost, including your Catalog then before ANY recovery takes place, you have
to bprecover (could take 40 - 2 hours depending on the size of the catalog. I
think one post noticed 1TB). Times are only an estimate.
If the Catalog was on its own SAN, or RAID+Hot Swap, it is
one less step involved to start recovery on production
systems.
I am happy about the catalog on a RAID5, Hot swappable, and
yes I have seen a complete RAID set die, including a SAN environment totally
destroyed all known disk groups, complete unrecoverable data and loss of
catalog. What did not help was the lack of knowledge about recovering netbackup
and the catalog tape process.
If there is a document that symentec gives preference about
the location of a catalog then it would be nice to see it. I am guessing that as
most post's shows its on the SAN, its probably not a big
deal.
I just look at it that from a DR point, keeping everything
about NetBackup grouped together, including the catalog.
Ed, 34 years old and probably older than yourself young
man, but as posted, some of the failures I have seen have been quite interesting
to see :-)
Thanks for your reply
Warm Regards
Simon
On Mon, May 12, 2008 at 10:13 AM, WEAVER, Simon (external) <simon.weaver AT astrium.eads DOT net>
wrote:
Presently, I have NetBackup and
the catalog installed locally, on RAID5 set, hot
swappable.
If you lose 2 drives in somewhat rapid succession, your catalog is
gone. The 2nd drive typically fails while you're rebuilding the RAIDset
after the first one dies due to the high load put on the drives. If you
haven't seen a double-disk failure yet, you're not old enough. Whether the
drives are hot swappable or not doesn't matter. What matters is whether
the RAID rebuild completes before the 2nd drive dies. The race is on and
sometimes the RAID rebuild doesn't complete in time.
My question is this: Is there a best
practice for the location of the Catalog? For example, SAN attached disk? I
sort of feel uncomfortable with this for several reasons:
1) If you lose SAN connectivity (due
to a major disaster or failure) the catalog has gone
If you lose SAN connectivity, you lose*access* to the catalog - you don't
lose the catalog.
Being stored locally, means the
Server and its application (including the catalog) goes with it, and does not
rely on an extra layer of hardware for the catalog to be available.
I think my concerns come from a
previous environment where the catalog was stored on a SAN, and was
totally destroyed and unrecoverable, which meant a complete import of hundreds
of tapes.
The likelihood of a well managed enterprise SAN destroying the data is FAR
less likely than a double-disk failure of a RAID-5 set. FAR, FAR, FAR
less.
If anyone has any feedback on this,
would like to hear the pro's and con's to storage off the physical server
itself. I have always had the catalog locally
stored.
My catalog is on the SAN. It's replicated to another SAN array.
It's also backed up to tape and the recovery information is emailed to my home
email address (since my work email is also SAN-based). If
you can't trust the reliability of your SAN, get another SAN and/or SAN
admin. And I'm a SAN admin...
.../Ed --
Ed Wilts, Mounds View, MN, USA RHCE, BCFP, BCSD, SCSP mailto:ewilts AT ewilts DOT org
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