Veritas-bu

Re: [Veritas-bu] Experiences with Netapp backups

2009-02-20 15:21:45
Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] Experiences with Netapp backups
From: Wayne T Smith <wts AT maine DOT edu>
To: veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
Date: Fri, 20 Feb 2009 15:03:26 -0500
We have a few NetApp filers with FC, iSCSI and NFS storage.

We don't do NDMP, but that's because of license costs and ignorance, I 
suppose.

Our backups have been host-based with traditional NetBackup file system 
and agents.

Recently, we've increased backups with NetApp snapshot (with a mirror, 
soon to be with SnapVault and then mirrored), mostly for the millions of 
files & little-change file systems, especially those applications whose 
backups must be coordinated amongst several file systems on several 
hosts.  Restore from snapshots of FC and iSCSI data is relatively costly 
(time and people-time), however.

As our NetApp support person works from home and will soon live 10 time 
zones away, we prefer solutions that don't require his direct touch. ;-)

NFS is an annoyance in that the ALL_LOCAL_FILES directive is sometimes 
not enough (the NBU (v5.1) Policy requires "Follow NFS" in order for NFS 
mounts to be backed up, and sometimes too much (if "Follow NFS" is in 
effect, all NFS gets backed up (w/o an exclude entry), even though we 
might think of backing up a particular NFS mount elsewhere).  As an 
application owner "moves" his NFS mounts, NetBackup gets "surprised" 
and/or we risk no backup.  We might or will go to a separate virtual 
machine (per data owner so we can continue to have the data owner do 
restores by herself), just to backup NFS and remove "Follow NFS" 
everywhere else.

Fyi ... earlier this month, NetApp announced "End of Availability for 
SnapVault for NetBackup".

Please tell us what you learn!

cheers, wayne

Michael Graff Andersen wrote, in part,  on 2009-02-19 8:44 AM:
> After our Netapp demo, I got curious what are the experiences of 
> people that have Netapp in production for backup ?
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