EMC & NDMP

[chad_small]

Does anyone know the answer to this question? I have an EMC Clariion and it looks like the easiest way to backup some problem file systems is by NDMP. Does EMC Clariion support NDMP? Is there any specific configuration that does or do they all support it natively? Does it need a Celerra NAS head? Any information from EMC knowledgeable people is appreciated. My problem is that the GPFS file system it is using does not support TSM image backup so an NDMP volume backup would work just as well.

 

[PJ]

AFAIK only the IP Clariion models support NDMP as part of the NAS functionality. A "normal" FC Clariion is just a disk subsystem. We backup our GPFS clusters through dedicated backup nodes (which doesn't really help a lot).



Cheers,

PJ

 

[chad_small]

My problem with GPFS is many. They are on 32-bit systems with 4 GB of RAM (TSM scheduler grabs 1GB when started), each file system has over 9 million files and growing, GPFS does not support Image Backup, and Incrementals are taking over 48 hrs to complete. So My hope was there was a way to do an NDMP dump of the filesystems but I guess not.

 

[PJ]

We're running on p5 with 24GB per node and 4 nodes in the cluster plus the backup node. We're doing backups via GPFS snaps and that improved scanning a lot. There's some sample shell script somewhere in the mmfs dirs for backing up using snaps which we based our stuff on. Our problems seem more related to the general code quality of GPFS rather than the number ob objects.



Cheers,

PJ

 

[chad_small]

Is the snap an image or are you just backing up a mirrored copy? Sounds like the later, which wont help with my scanning enough to speed it up under 1 day. Also they probably wont spring for more space to do the snaps.

 

[PJ]

I'm talking about native GPFS snapshots using mmcrsnapshot, mmbackup and the GPFS specific TSM client filescan routines.



Cheers,

PJ