file system backups of a Dell NDMP Equallogic device
We have two Dell NDMP storage devices and a TSM server at both sites. We'd like to be able to root file level (image backups don't help much) backups (and restores if necessary) of the entire NDMP device to the local TSM server. Can someone point me in the right direction or tell me how they did it? NAS/NDMP is pretty new to me and from what I have read so far, the documentation talks about backing up directly to tape, which we don't have any more. All of our storage is online. What I was originally planning on doing, was creating all of the NFS shares on one linux server, and backing them up as /virtualmountpoints. I'd like to setup just one which points to the root of all the NFS systems on the NAS device but I see no way to do that either. Any help is appreciated.
Re: file system backups of a Dell NDMP Equallogic device
Op 13 feb. 2014, om 20:11 heeft Dury, John C. het volgende geschreven: > We have two Dell NDMP storage devices and a TSM server at both sites. We'd > like to be able to root file level (image backups don't help much) backups > (and restores if necessary) of the entire NDMP device to the local TSM > server. Can someone point me in the right direction or tell me how they did > it? NAS/NDMP is pretty new to me and from what I have read so far, the > documentation talks about backing up directly to tape, which we don't have > any more. All of our storage is online. > > What I was originally planning on doing, was creating all of the NFS shares > on one linux server, and backing them up as /virtualmountpoints. I'd like to > setup just one which points to the root of all the NFS systems on the NAS > device but I see no way to do that either. > Any help is appreciated. if supported by the Dell, NDMP to disk is even simpler than NDMP to tape... just don't define any paths from the datamover to tape (which you don't have any way) -- Met vriendelijke groeten/Kind Regards, Remco Post r.p...@plcs.nl +31 6 248 21 622
Re: file system backups of a Dell NDMP Equallogic device
You don't have to use tape. You can do NDMP backups via TCP/IP to your regular TSM storage pool hierarchy. But AFAIK you still have to do it at the volume/share level that the NAS device understands, I don't think you can do it at the root. Using "virtualmountpoint" is for backing up incrementally at the *file* level via NFS or CIFS mounts, not NDMP, so I'm not sure which way you are headed. Question is, what are you doing this for? NDMP is a stupid, simplistic protocol. You won't like what you have to do to achieve an individual file restore. If you are trying to get DR capability to rebuild your NDMP shares in case of an emergency, it makes sense. If you are just trying to provide backup coverage to restore people's files like you would from a file server, it may not. If you want to do NDMP via TCP/IP instead of direct to tape, reply with your TSM server platform and server level, and I'll send you back the page reference in the manual you need... W -Original Message- From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L@VM.MARIST.EDU] On Behalf Of Dury, John C. Sent: Thursday, February 13, 2014 2:11 PM To: ADSM-L@VM.MARIST.EDU Subject: [ADSM-L] file system backups of a Dell NDMP Equallogic device We have two Dell NDMP storage devices and a TSM server at both sites. We'd like to be able to root file level (image backups don't help much) backups (and restores if necessary) of the entire NDMP device to the local TSM server. Can someone point me in the right direction or tell me how they did it? NAS/NDMP is pretty new to me and from what I have read so far, the documentation talks about backing up directly to tape, which we don't have any more. All of our storage is online. What I was originally planning on doing, was creating all of the NFS shares on one linux server, and backing them up as /virtualmountpoints. I'd like to setup just one which points to the root of all the NFS systems on the NAS device but I see no way to do that either. Any help is appreciated.
Re: file system backups of a Dell NDMP Equallogic device
I agree with Wanda. Our strategy for our filers (BlueARC, Isilon) is to backup at the file-level exclusively, using NFS. Modern TSM servers support no-query restores well enough that we can get a restore of the latest data very quickly (make sure you have plenty of CPU and memory, along with very fast database disks). To perform the backups efficiently, you might want to think about splitting your data up into separate nodes or filespaces, backed up with independent schedules, so that you're not bottlenecked on a single component. As far as I can tell, NDMP was written by storage vendors to make one buy more expensive storage, and more of it than one needs. On Thu, Feb 13, 2014 at 09:03:15PM +, Prather, Wanda wrote: > You don't have to use tape. > You can do NDMP backups via TCP/IP to your regular TSM storage pool hierarchy. > But AFAIK you still have to do it at the volume/share level that the NAS > device understands, I don't think you can do it at the root. > > Using "virtualmountpoint" is for backing up incrementally at the *file* level > via NFS or CIFS mounts, not NDMP, so I'm not sure which way you are headed. > > Question is, what are you doing this for? > NDMP is a stupid, simplistic protocol. You won't like what you have to do to > achieve an individual file restore. If you are trying to get DR capability > to rebuild your NDMP shares in case of an emergency, it makes sense. If you > are just trying to provide backup coverage to restore people's files like you > would from a file server, it may not. > > If you want to do NDMP via TCP/IP instead of direct to tape, reply with your > TSM server platform and server level, and I'll send you back the page > reference in the manual you need... > > W > > > > > -Original Message- > From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L@VM.MARIST.EDU] On Behalf Of > Dury, John C. > Sent: Thursday, February 13, 2014 2:11 PM > To: ADSM-L@VM.MARIST.EDU > Subject: [ADSM-L] file system backups of a Dell NDMP Equallogic device > > We have two Dell NDMP storage devices and a TSM server at both sites. We'd > like to be able to root file level (image backups don't help much) backups > (and restores if necessary) of the entire NDMP device to the local TSM > server. Can someone point me in the right direction or tell me how they did > it? NAS/NDMP is pretty new to me and from what I have read so far, the > documentation talks about backing up directly to tape, which we don't have > any more. All of our storage is online. > > What I was originally planning on doing, was creating all of the NFS shares > on one linux server, and backing them up as /virtualmountpoints. I'd like to > setup just one which points to the root of all the NFS systems on the NAS > device but I see no way to do that either. > Any help is appreciated. -- -- Skylar Thompson (skyl...@u.washington.edu) -- Genome Sciences Department, System Administrator -- Foege Building S046, (206)-685-7354 -- University of Washington School of Medicine
Re: file system backups of a Dell NDMP Equallogic device
We are more concerned about file level backups than an image backup. Eventually the NAS devices will be replicating using Equallogic replication once we get some more storage but for now, we want to make sure that the files in the NFS shares are correctly backed up but I really wanted to avoid backing up the same NFS data to multiple TSM nodes since some of the NFS mount are shared amongst several servers/nodes. My strategy is to pick one TSM node and make sure it has NFS mounts for all of the NFS that live on the NAS and then just backup it up as virtualmountpoint(s) so something like this /NAS exists off of root on TSM node and is local mount NFS1 as /NAS/NFS1 mount NFS2 as /NAS/NFS2 etc put entry in dsm.sys virtualmountpoint /NAS and then just let incrementals run normally. All restores would need to be done on the NODE that can see all of the NFS mounts. Think that will work? I agree with Wanda. Our strategy for our filers (BlueARC, Isilon) is to backup at the file-level exclusively, using NFS. Modern TSM servers support no-query restores well enough that we can get a restore of the latest data very quickly (make sure you have plenty of CPU and memory, along with very fast database disks). To perform the backups efficiently, you might want to think about splitting your data up into separate nodes or filespaces, backed up with independent schedules, so that you're not bottlenecked on a single component. As far as I can tell, NDMP was written by storage vendors to make one buy more expensive storage, and more of it than one needs. You don't have to use tape. You can do NDMP backups via TCP/IP to your regular TSM storage pool hierarchy. But AFAIK you still have to do it at the volume/share level that the NAS device understands, I don't think you can do it at the root. Using "virtualmountpoint" is for backing up incrementally at the *file* level via NFS or CIFS mounts, not NDMP, so I'm not sure which way you are headed. Question is, what are you doing this for? NDMP is a stupid, simplistic protocol. You won't like what you have to do to achieve an individual file restore. If you are trying to get DR capability to rebuild your NDMP shares in case of an emergency, it makes sense. If you are just trying to provide backup coverage to restore people's files like you would from a file server, it may not. If you want to do NDMP via TCP/IP instead of direct to tape, reply with your TSM server platform and server level, and I'll send you back the page reference in the manual you need... W -Original Message- From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On Behalf Of Dury, John C. Sent: Thursday, February 13, 2014 2:11 PM To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU Subject: [ADSM-L] file system backups of a Dell NDMP Equallogic device We have two Dell NDMP storage devices and a TSM server at both sites. We'd like to be able to root file level (image backups don't help much) backups (and restores if necessary) of the entire NDMP device to the local TSM server. Can someone point me in the right direction or tell me how they did it? NAS/NDMP is pretty new to me and from what I have read so far, the documentation talks about backing up directly to tape, which we don't have any more. All of our storage is online. What I was originally planning on doing, was creating all of the NFS shares on one linux server, and backing them up as /virtualmountpoints. I'd like to setup just one which points to the root of all the NFS systems on the NAS device but I see no way to do that either. Any help is appreciated. Op 13 feb. 2014, om 20:11 heeft Dury, John C. het volgende geschreven: > We have two Dell NDMP storage devices and a TSM server at both sites. We'd > like to be able to root file level (image backups don't help much) backups > (and restores if necessary) of the entire NDMP device to the local TSM > server. Can someone point me in the right direction or tell me how they did > it? NAS/NDMP is pretty new to me and from what I have read so far, the > documentation talks about backing up directly to tape, which we don't have > any more. All of our storage is online. > > What I was originally planning on doing, was creating all of the NFS shares > on one linux server, and backing them up as /virtualmountpoints. I'd like to > setup just one which points to the root of all the NFS systems on the NAS > device but I see no way to do that either. > Any help is appreciated. if supported by the Dell, NDMP to disk is even simpler than NDMP to tape... just don't define any paths from the datamover to tape (which you don't have any way) -- Met vriendelijke groeten/Kind Regards, Remco Post r.post AT plcs DOT nl +31 6 248 21 622
Re: file system backups of a Dell NDMP Equallogic device
Oh, that works just fine. Then you're backing up over NFS, no NDMP involved. And TSM will not back up an NFS-mounted volume by default, so you won't get multiple copies. Put the virtualmountpoint names in the DOMAIN statement in dsm.sys of the client you want to run the backups (or create dsmc incr commands that list the sharenames, however you roll), fight through whatever permissions issues pop up, and Bob's your uncle. You'll get incremental-only backups of those files. What you won't know for a while, is how long it takes to noodle through the filesystems across the NFS mount- depends on how many kazillion objects in the directories. If you list the names in the DOMAIN statement, you can add "RESOURCEUTILIZATION 10" to the dsm.sys and process 4 shares at once, if the directory noodling is more time consuming than the actual data transfer, which it usually is if these shares are made of a lot of small files. If you can't get through them by running 4 at a time, I've solved that before by setting up multiple proxy clients (using GRANT PROXYNODE), to get even more parallel streams running, but with all the backups stored under 1 nodename so that it's easy to find them at restore time. W -Original Message- From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L@VM.MARIST.EDU] On Behalf Of Dury, John C. Sent: Friday, February 14, 2014 3:46 PM To: ADSM-L@VM.MARIST.EDU Subject: Re: [ADSM-L] file system backups of a Dell NDMP Equallogic device We are more concerned about file level backups than an image backup. Eventually the NAS devices will be replicating using Equallogic replication once we get some more storage but for now, we want to make sure that the files in the NFS shares are correctly backed up but I really wanted to avoid backing up the same NFS data to multiple TSM nodes since some of the NFS mount are shared amongst several servers/nodes. My strategy is to pick one TSM node and make sure it has NFS mounts for all of the NFS that live on the NAS and then just backup it up as virtualmountpoint(s) so something like this /NAS exists off of root on TSM node and is local mount NFS1 as /NAS/NFS1 mount NFS2 as /NAS/NFS2 etc put entry in dsm.sys virtualmountpoint /NAS and then just let incrementals run normally. All restores would need to be done on the NODE that can see all of the NFS mounts. Think that will work? I agree with Wanda. Our strategy for our filers (BlueARC, Isilon) is to backup at the file-level exclusively, using NFS. Modern TSM servers support no-query restores well enough that we can get a restore of the latest data very quickly (make sure you have plenty of CPU and memory, along with very fast database disks). To perform the backups efficiently, you might want to think about splitting your data up into separate nodes or filespaces, backed up with independent schedules, so that you're not bottlenecked on a single component. As far as I can tell, NDMP was written by storage vendors to make one buy more expensive storage, and more of it than one needs. You don't have to use tape. You can do NDMP backups via TCP/IP to your regular TSM storage pool hierarchy. But AFAIK you still have to do it at the volume/share level that the NAS device understands, I don't think you can do it at the root. Using "virtualmountpoint" is for backing up incrementally at the *file* level via NFS or CIFS mounts, not NDMP, so I'm not sure which way you are headed. Question is, what are you doing this for? NDMP is a stupid, simplistic protocol. You won't like what you have to do to achieve an individual file restore. If you are trying to get DR capability to rebuild your NDMP shares in case of an emergency, it makes sense. If you are just trying to provide backup coverage to restore people's files like you would from a file server, it may not. If you want to do NDMP via TCP/IP instead of direct to tape, reply with your TSM server platform and server level, and I'll send you back the page reference in the manual you need... W -Original Message- From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On Behalf Of Dury, John C. Sent: Thursday, February 13, 2014 2:11 PM To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU Subject: [ADSM-L] file system backups of a Dell NDMP Equallogic device We have two Dell NDMP storage devices and a TSM server at both sites. We'd like to be able to root file level (image backups don't help much) backups (and restores if necessary) of the entire NDMP device to the local TSM server. Can someone point me in the right direction or tell me how they did it? NAS/NDMP is pretty new to me and from what I have read so far, the documentation talks about backing up directly to tape, which we don't have any more. All of our storage is online. What I was
Re: file system backups of a Dell NDMP Equallogic device
Sorry for revisiting this but I'm in a predicament now. Trying to backup the NDMP device is a miserable failure and frankly just ugly. I honestly can't see why anyone would use TSM to backup any NDMP devices except for maybe speed issues. We decided to mount all of the NFS shares locally on the TSM server and allow them to be backed up that way but now the problem is that even with resourceutilization set to 20, it still takes 18+ hours just to do an incremental because there are millions and millions of files in all of those NFS shares. So this isn't going to work either. I can try the proxy node solution but frankly I'm skeptical about it also because of the tremendous number of small files. Of course this is all for a mission critical application so I have to come up with a workable solution and I'm running out of ideas. Help! Oh, that works just fine. Then you're backing up over NFS, no NDMP involved. And TSM will not back up an NFS-mounted volume by default, so you won't get multiple copies. Put the virtualmountpoint names in the DOMAIN statement in dsm.sys of the client you want to run the backups (or create dsmc incr commands that list the sharenames, however you roll), fight through whatever permissions issues pop up, and Bob's your uncle. You'll get incremental-only backups of those files. What you won't know for a while, is how long it takes to noodle through the filesystems across the NFS mount- depends on how many kazillion objects in the directories. If you list the names in the DOMAIN statement, you can add "RESOURCEUTILIZATION 10" to the dsm.sys and process 4 shares at once, if the directory noodling is more time consuming than the actual data transfer, which it usually is if these shares are made of a lot of small files. If you can't get through them by running 4 at a time, I've solved that before by setting up multiple proxy clients (using GRANT PROXYNODE), to get even more parallel streams running, but with all the backups stored under 1 nodename so that it's easy to find them at restore time. W -Original Message- From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On Behalf Of Dury, John C. Sent: Friday, February 14, 2014 3:46 PM To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU Subject: Re: [ADSM-L] file system backups of a Dell NDMP Equallogic device We are more concerned about file level backups than an image backup. Eventually the NAS devices will be replicating using Equallogic replication once we get some more storage but for now, we want to make sure that the files in the NFS shares are correctly backed up but I really wanted to avoid backing up the same NFS data to multiple TSM nodes since some of the NFS mount are shared amongst several servers/nodes. My strategy is to pick one TSM node and make sure it has NFS mounts for all of the NFS that live on the NAS and then just backup it up as virtualmountpoint(s) so something like this /NAS exists off of root on TSM node and is local mount NFS1 as /NAS/NFS1 mount NFS2 as /NAS/NFS2 etc put entry in dsm.sys virtualmountpoint /NAS and then just let incrementals run normally. All restores would need to be done on the NODE that can see all of the NFS mounts. Think that will work? I agree with Wanda. Our strategy for our filers (BlueARC, Isilon) is to backup at the file-level exclusively, using NFS. Modern TSM servers support no-query restores well enough that we can get a restore of the latest data very quickly (make sure you have plenty of CPU and memory, along with very fast database disks). To perform the backups efficiently, you might want to think about splitting your data up into separate nodes or filespaces, backed up with independent schedules, so that you're not bottlenecked on a single component. As far as I can tell, NDMP was written by storage vendors to make one buy more expensive storage, and more of it than one needs. You don't have to use tape. You can do NDMP backups via TCP/IP to your regular TSM storage pool hierarchy. But AFAIK you still have to do it at the volume/share level that the NAS device understands, I don't think you can do it at the root. Using "virtualmountpoint" is for backing up incrementally at the *file* level via NFS or CIFS mounts, not NDMP, so I'm not sure which way you are headed. Question is, what are you doing this for? NDMP is a stupid, simplistic protocol. You won't like what you have to do to achieve an individual file restore. If you are trying to get DR capability to rebuild your NDMP shares in case of an emergency, it makes sense. If you are just trying to provide backup coverage to restore people's files like you would from a file server, it may not. I
Re: file system backups of a Dell NDMP Equallogic device
Agreed that NDMP is awful. I think you're on the right track with your NFS solution. Here's how we deal with it now: * Break your NFS volumes up into different mount points (i.e. break /net/example/foo into /net/example/foo/dir1, /net/example/foo/dir2, ...). Reference each mount point using -domain. * Break each schedule up using a combination of schedule nodes and proxy nodes. Associate the schedules with the schedule nodes, and then associate the storage back to the underlying node using -asnode. For instance, assuming a storage node of NFS-EXAMPLE, create two schedule nodes NFS-EXAMPLE-FOO-DIR1 and NFS-EXAMPLE-FOO-DIR2. Associate the first directory with the first node using "-domain=/net/example/foo/dir1" in the client options, and the second directory with the second node using "domain=/net/example/foo/dir2". Use -asnode=NFS-EXAMPLE in both. This doesn't avoid all the concurrency problems; looking back, it might have been better just to use many nodes with storage directly associated with them and not use -asnode. On Mon, May 05, 2014 at 07:26:36PM -0400, Dury, John C. wrote: > Sorry for revisiting this but I'm in a predicament now. Trying to backup the > NDMP device is a miserable failure and frankly just ugly. I honestly can't > see why anyone would use TSM to backup any NDMP devices except for maybe > speed issues. > > We decided to mount all of the NFS shares locally on the TSM server and allow > them to be backed up that way but now the problem is that even with > resourceutilization set to 20, it still takes 18+ hours just to do an > incremental because there are millions and millions of files in all of those > NFS shares. So this isn't going to work either. I can try the proxy node > solution but frankly I'm skeptical about it also because of the tremendous > number of small files. Of course this is all for a mission critical > application so I have to come up with a workable solution and I'm running out > of ideas. -- -- Skylar Thompson (skyl...@u.washington.edu) -- Genome Sciences Department, System Administrator -- Foege Building S046, (206)-685-7354 -- University of Washington School of Medicine
Re: file system backups of a Dell NDMP Equallogic device
Taking opportunity to mount soapbox on this issue: I have SO many customer that are facing this problem. Vendors of giant NAS devices *should* be providing better, decent solutions to back them up. It's very do-able, it's just that crappy vendors don't care what they dump on you. NetApp, for example, has implemented their SnapDiff API that provides true incrementals, and it works. I have no other reason to plug NetApp, I'm just pointing out that other vendors could do the same thing, if they wanted to - it's not impossible. I know, in most cases backup folks have hardware dropped on us without any input into the purchase, and we are just stuck with it. BUT the only thing that is going to solve this industry-wide problem in the long run, is whenever tech people hear there is a purchase going down, we step in and tell management STOP! WHAT ARE YOU THINKING?!?, and boycott vendors who inflict bad technology on us when they could do better. Soapbox off. W -Original Message- From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L@VM.MARIST.EDU] On Behalf Of Skylar Thompson Sent: Tuesday, May 06, 2014 1:10 PM To: ADSM-L@VM.MARIST.EDU Subject: Re: [ADSM-L] file system backups of a Dell NDMP Equallogic device Agreed that NDMP is awful. I think you're on the right track with your NFS solution. Here's how we deal with it now: * Break your NFS volumes up into different mount points (i.e. break /net/example/foo into /net/example/foo/dir1, /net/example/foo/dir2, ...). Reference each mount point using -domain. * Break each schedule up using a combination of schedule nodes and proxy nodes. Associate the schedules with the schedule nodes, and then associate the storage back to the underlying node using -asnode. For instance, assuming a storage node of NFS-EXAMPLE, create two schedule nodes NFS-EXAMPLE-FOO-DIR1 and NFS-EXAMPLE-FOO-DIR2. Associate the first directory with the first node using "-domain=/net/example/foo/dir1" in the client options, and the second directory with the second node using "domain=/net/example/foo/dir2". Use -asnode=NFS-EXAMPLE in both. This doesn't avoid all the concurrency problems; looking back, it might have been better just to use many nodes with storage directly associated with them and not use -asnode. On Mon, May 05, 2014 at 07:26:36PM -0400, Dury, John C. wrote: > Sorry for revisiting this but I'm in a predicament now. Trying to backup the > NDMP device is a miserable failure and frankly just ugly. I honestly can't > see why anyone would use TSM to backup any NDMP devices except for maybe > speed issues. > > We decided to mount all of the NFS shares locally on the TSM server and allow > them to be backed up that way but now the problem is that even with > resourceutilization set to 20, it still takes 18+ hours just to do an > incremental because there are millions and millions of files in all of those > NFS shares. So this isn't going to work either. I can try the proxy node > solution but frankly I'm skeptical about it also because of the tremendous > number of small files. Of course this is all for a mission critical > application so I have to come up with a workable solution and I'm running out > of ideas. -- -- Skylar Thompson (skyl...@u.washington.edu) -- Genome Sciences Department, System Administrator -- Foege Building S046, (206)-685-7354 -- University of Washington School of Medicine
Re: file system backups of a Dell NDMP Equallogic device
I so wish we could do this. Unfortunately, backups/restores are considered an afterthought both by the vendors and customer management. In general, data lifecycle management has gotten to be a thornier problem over the years, and a lot of people deal with that by ignoring it until it's a serious issue. On Tue, May 06, 2014 at 07:30:23PM +, Prather, Wanda wrote: > Taking opportunity to mount soapbox on this issue: > > I have SO many customer that are facing this problem. > Vendors of giant NAS devices *should* be providing better, decent solutions > to back them up. > It's very do-able, it's just that crappy vendors don't care what they dump on > you. > > NetApp, for example, has implemented their SnapDiff API that provides true > incrementals, and it works. > I have no other reason to plug NetApp, I'm just pointing out that other > vendors could do the same thing, if they wanted to - it's not impossible. > > I know, in most cases backup folks have hardware dropped on us without any > input into the purchase, and we are just stuck with it. > BUT the only thing that is going to solve this industry-wide problem in the > long run, is whenever tech people hear there is a purchase going down, we > step in and tell management STOP! WHAT ARE YOU THINKING?!?, and boycott > vendors who inflict bad technology on us when they could do better. > > Soapbox off. > > W -- -- Skylar Thompson (skyl...@u.washington.edu) -- Genome Sciences Department, System Administrator -- Foege Building S046, (206)-685-7354 -- University of Washington School of Medicine
Re: file system backups of a Dell NDMP Equallogic device
Actually IBM does consider backup and ILM in the GPFS file system. Now with the new NFS integration features in GPFS V4.1 the errors of your NAS ways can be corrected. kenb...@us.ibm.com On Tue, May 6, 2014 at 3:35 PM, Skylar Thompson wrote: > I so wish we could do this. Unfortunately, backups/restores are considered > an > afterthought both by the vendors and customer management. In general, data > lifecycle management has gotten to be a thornier problem over the years, > and a lot of people deal with that by ignoring it until it's a serious > issue. > > On Tue, May 06, 2014 at 07:30:23PM +, Prather, Wanda wrote: > > Taking opportunity to mount soapbox on this issue: > > > > I have SO many customer that are facing this problem. > > Vendors of giant NAS devices *should* be providing better, decent > solutions to back them up. > > It's very do-able, it's just that crappy vendors don't care what they > dump on you. > > > > NetApp, for example, has implemented their SnapDiff API that provides > true incrementals, and it works. > > I have no other reason to plug NetApp, I'm just pointing out that other > vendors could do the same thing, if they wanted to - it's not impossible. > > > > I know, in most cases backup folks have hardware dropped on us without > any input into the purchase, and we are just stuck with it. > > BUT the only thing that is going to solve this industry-wide problem in > the long run, is whenever tech people hear there is a purchase going down, > we step in and tell management STOP! WHAT ARE YOU THINKING?!?, and boycott > vendors who inflict bad technology on us when they could do better. > > > > Soapbox off. > > > > W > > -- > -- Skylar Thompson (skyl...@u.washington.edu) > -- Genome Sciences Department, System Administrator > -- Foege Building S046, (206)-685-7354 > -- University of Washington School of Medicine > -- Ken Bury
Re: file system backups of a Dell NDMP Equallogic device
Fair enough. But I think IBM might be the exception here (TSM is another product that proves it). Unfortunately, both of these products come at an upfront price that allows other vendors to undercut them *initially*. Of course, if you look years later, products with ILM built in from the start are going to start looking pretty good. Every time we buy new storage, I ask two questions: 1. How are we going to restore it when it fails or someone goofs? 2. How are we going to migrate off it when the time comes to retire it? Every time, we end up with a NAS device where these questions are answered as an afterthought at best, because it's the most cost-effective solution initially. On 05/06/2014 04:57 PM, Ken Bury wrote: > Actually IBM does consider backup and ILM in the GPFS file system. Now with > the new NFS integration features in GPFS V4.1 the errors of your NAS ways > can be corrected. > > kenb...@us.ibm.com -- -- Skylar Thompson (skyl...@u.washington.edu) -- Genome Sciences Department, System Administrator -- Foege Building S046, (206)-685-7354