We are looking to do this down the road, but no experience yet.
- What kind of NDMP backups were you trying to do, and what problems did
you run into?
- Are you concerned about how long it would take to do a file-level restore
for such a large server?
- Do you keep internal snaps in the NetApp for user restores?

..Paul

At 02:18 PM 6/11/2009, you wrote:

Has anyone put this into production use yet?  Our initial testing is
very positive.

   Currently we have to keep all user files for 7 years.  I have 2
NetApp filer clusters with about 35 million files in 130  CIFS shares.
NDMP backup is unworkable. It takes slightly over 24 hours to perform
one complete backup from 6 Windows backup clients noodling through all
of these files and sending about 200GB of changed data to 2 AIX TSM
servers (currently we have about 300TB of data on tape).  The data
transfer is not the slow part - the search through the files is what
takes most of the time.

   We have done quite a bit of testing with -snapdiff and discovered a
few differences in how files are processed but nothing so far that will
keep us from putting this feature into production soon.  I am expecting
to dramatically reduce my backup time while maintaining or improving
service levels and expectations.

   I would appreciate anyone's input with their experience with this
feature.


For those who would like to know, these filers are mirrored to a remote
site.  TSM is a secondary recovery mechanism - I don't expect to recover
an entire filer with TSM, but could....with a couple of weeks spare time
:)


Thank you,
Neil Strand
Storage Engineer - Legg Mason
Baltimore, MD.
(410) 580-7491
Whatever you can do or believe you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power and magic.

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