I think it is rather telling that by “remote”
they only mention NFS/CIFS and not SAN which does not have the performance
issues they allude to for the former two.
My comment about DR planning was not to
justify SAN vs. internal RAID but rather to point out that if you’ve
properly done the DR planning it doesn’t matter which way you go as you
will be able to recover from catastrophic failure. That comment was
specifically aimed at your implication that it was somehow the use of SAN that
caused meltdown at a prior job – I was saying that the main issue at that
prior job was poor DR preparedness rather than infrastructure though I suspect
the SAN infrastructure itself was poorly planned as well if you experienced a
total meltdown.
Oddly enough I’m not a big fan of
putting all one’s eggs into one basket however to manage a large data
center unfortunately requires doing quite a bit of that. There are economies
of scale that make SAN storage not only viable but necessary for large
systems. There isn’t an internal RAID yet that will hold the ~500 TB of
storage we have for our large UNIX systems. As I noted before once you DO have
a SAN it makes a lot of sense to use that same infrastructure to allow media
servers to mount the tape drives (or disk backup) to each of the media servers.
Moreover becoming comfortable with how SANs operates (including planned
redundancy) one sees the value in separating storage from servers especially
where cluster environments are concerned where it is required.
From your past comments I’m pretty
sure you do Windows rather than UNIX so don’t really have an idea of the
need for scalability are and why SANs are so important in large data
environments.
However, you’re entitled to your
opinions.
From: WEAVER, Simon
(external) [mailto:simon.weaver AT astrium.eads DOT net]
Sent: Tuesday, May 13, 2008 6:11
AM
To: Jeff Lightner;
veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
Subject: RE: [Veritas-bu] Best
Practice: Location of the NetBackup Catalog
Jeff
I am struggling to find anything that
talks about the location or best DR practice of NBU. In the Sys Admin guide,
the only reference I see about the catalog is that the binary catalog is more
sensitive to the location of the catalog (see page 203 in 5.1 guide). It
mentions that storing the catalog on a remote file system may have critical
performance issues for catalog abckups. and that NetBackup does not support
saving catalogs to a remote file system such as NFS or CIFS.
From a DR point of view, I would like to
see the NetBackup system and catalog "outside" the control of any
production SAN environment. all eggs in one basket comes to mind, and if
something is going to go bang, you do not want your NetBackup environment
inside this SAN. (If poss).
I have always stored the Data on a RAID
set with a hot spare each and everytime. If I want to recover production
systems attached to a SAN due to a shelf failure, I would rather be in a
position and say "Hey no problem, we can do
that", rather than say "sorry, got to recover my catalogs from a disk that is not
presented from the SAN anymore". Obviously that is
worse case scenario, and I apprecaite that.
Murphy's Law = If
anything can go wrong, it will :-)
Anyone else able to share their views on
their current Catalog environment?
Simon
From: Jeff
Lightner [mailto:jlightner AT water DOT com]
Sent: Monday, May 12, 2008 6:03 PM
To: WEAVER, Simon (external);
veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
Subject: RE: [Veritas-bu] Best
Practice: Location of the NetBackup Catalog
We’ve stored our NBU on SAN attached
storage since inception.
So long as you’re doing
catalog/database backups any failure whether on internal drives or on SAN
drives can be recovered from.
Since we also have our tape drives
accesses via SAN from the master and multiple media servers it seems there
would be a risk to backups if the SAN failed completely.
Having a complete SAN failure is something
I’ve not seen in over 3 ½ years here or at various other jobs where we
had SAN. I suspect your issue at the previous job was more due to poor
design of the infrastructure than to any inherent risk of using SAN vs.
Internal storage.
Even if it IS on internal storage you do
risk the server itself melting down and with RAID 5 loss of two drives at the
same time (rare but HAS been seen by me in that same 3 ½ year period) would
lose your catalogs/database just like losing the SAN would.
Additionally with a SAN you can (and should) have multiple paths to the data
meaning loss of a single controller doesn’t blow you out of the water
whereas internal RAID 5 is almost always on a single controller.
Finally in most environments where SANs
are in place the raison d’etre for the SAN was not the backup solution but
rather large disk storage needs for running environments. In the
unlikely event of a full SAN failure I suspect the main issue would be your
loss of those environments rather than the backup solution though of course
losing the backup solution means you’re delayed in trying to bring up the
rest of the environments. However, here again valid
catalog/database backups occurring on a regular basis is the way around this
– not eliminating the SAN.
You might want to have a look at NBU
Disaster Recovery planning guidelines for more details as it sounds as if your
prior employer was ill prepared for such a loss.
From:
veritas-bu-bounces AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
[mailto:veritas-bu-bounces AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu] On Behalf Of WEAVER, Simon (external)
Sent: Monday, May 12, 2008 11:13
AM
To:
veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
Subject: [Veritas-bu] Best
Practice: Location of the NetBackup Catalog
All,
Just a general query on the best practice for the location of
the NetBackup catalog (Its DB, images, ect).
When you install NBU on a Server, the location can be
accepted as the "default" or you can customise the installation and
choose an alternative location (ie: Spare drive on local server, SAN attached
drive, ect).
Presently, I have NetBackup and the catalog installed
locally, on RAID5 set, hot swappable.
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
2) NetBackup and the OS relies on that disk being available
constantly
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.
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.
Thanks, Simon
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