Karen Dutch gave a good overview of the problems with NAS backup and asked
what we (customers) really wanted when we said we want this. I'll try and
summarise.

NetApp filers (does anyone use NDMP with anything else??) can 1/ drive
locally attached tape drives or can 2/ send the filesystem (as a single
image) across the network to a backup server.

Pros and cons for each should be fairly obvious. The locally attached drives
defeat the purpose in having a centralised backup mechanism and the single
image means you can't restore an individual file from the image.

A combination of backup via NFS/CIFS to the ADSM server to get file level
granularity combined with local dumps on the filer for fast recovery would
seem to be the optimum solution. In any case we should perhaps discuss what
it is we really want and get the message in. There appears to be a
willingness to do it now if we can just articulate what we really want.

Open discussion invited....

Alan