On Tue, Oct 10, 2006 at 12:31:52PM -1000, Aaron Becar wrote:
> Sunmansun,
>
> Hey we just received word that Mirapoint does not support a fiber
> attached drive. So my question for you, is how are you doing it? Do
> you have a separate library connected to the Mirapoint server via the
> SCSI (LVD) port? What kind of infrastructure do you have setup to make
> this successful?
For the record, here is what we ended up doing.
We have a HP EVA 9K that we use for the storage of 6 Mirapoint boxen.
We start by making a snapshot of the mirapoint storage LU, then present that
to a backup 'frontend'. The frontend mounts that LU. Using the TSM image
backup client, we then backup the image to TSM. During the day, we make
offsite copies per TSM normal processing.
With Mirapoint M5K's and SAN storage, individual mailbox restores that you
might have had with NDMP and TOC support are gone.
Since we have promised through legacy service levels to provide mail folder
restores to our customers up to seven days past, we have a spare M5K that
allows us to restore an image from any one of the servers, then to an IMAP
copy of the mailbox to the production server.
For tape device, we are using our 3494 tape library with the new 3592 E05
drives, which totally rock IMHO.
Caveats:
Mirapoint engineering is working on a patch to allow the growth of a LU from
your original defined size to the max size supported.
M5K's have a max LU size of 1TB, there are some other limitations, but
I forget what they are.
There is only one OS that will allow you to 'mount' the snapshot from the
Mirapoint box .. FreeBSD. You can run the TSM image client in Linux compat
mode, and it works fine. It may look messy, but it works fine for us at the
moment, and we have inhouse support for FreeBSD. You can't do anything other
than read the LU from the frontend, since the FreeBSD da driver knows that
something is wrong with the label and the superblock of the disk. Mirapoint
runs with a customized BSD filesystem.
We had to write a few scripts that create the snaps, to the presentation of
the lu to the frontend, then fire off a backup. The script(s) is run through
the TSM scheduler.
You may be able to pull the mounting of of the Mirapoint disk on Solaris, or
AIX, if you use some type of generic driver. Our attempts failed, since the
drivers are too picky at how the partition structure is to deal with it. We
found that you may be able to 'see' the device, but just not be able to do
anything with it.
We run the backups directly to tape, since it would be to wasteful to go
to disk yet again, and like I said the drives are smoking, so we can stream
to them at better than disk speed, and get very good compression. I have
almost 2.5TB on some of the tapes. This beats the price of disk hands down,
and the ROI/TCO is lower.
We like not having to deal with NDMP any more, and use native TSM processing
to work with the Mirapoint storage. We have tested restores from active
processing, and they work ok for now. Some tell us because of the nature
of Mirapoint operations, and 'snapshots' that we may be rolling the dice when
it comes to a consistent restore, but we don't have any alternatives that
meet our budget, and offsite requirements except for this.
Happy hunting, and I hope this helps people out there. Contact me offline
if you have any additional questions, or need further details.
Bob Booth
UIUC/CITES
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