Re: [Veritas-bu] Experiences with Netapp backups
We're using NDMP to FC tape for weekly fulls, and NDMP to a disk staging STU on the master server for daily differentials. It's very reliable. The only issue I have is the performance. For the FULLs, we write to 2 tape drives in parallel. We get about 50-60 MB/sec to each drive. I know the drives are capable of a lot more - our Linux media servers can pump out 160 MB/sec to a single drive. But our Netapp box is relatively low end and quite old now (V3020 gateway - which has been superseded) It takes just over 24 hours to do the weekly FULL backup (about 10TB). We run one backup stream per Netapp volume, of which there about 22, ranging in size up to 1.3TB. We don't multiplex to the tapes - writing one stream per tape drive. I've messed around with multiplexing and the number of drives being used in parallel, but I've never been able to get it above that 50-60 MB/sec per drive. The drives are IBM 3592-E05 (TS1120 is their other name, I think). Doing the daily DIFFs to disk works well. Incremental backups can take a long time to decide what actually needs to be backed up before any I/O actually happens. Directing these to disk means NDMP is not holding a tape drive for a long time without actually doing any I/O. NDMP to disk became possible with either 6.5.1 or 6.5.2 A nice thing is that ONTAP (the Netapp operating system) seems to be pretty good at prioritising "user I/O" over backup I/O. If our full backups run into online time, when we have thousands of users connected connected via CIFS for their desktop file serving needs, the backup speed will drop right down, as ONTAP prioritises the user's I/O. Annoying for the backups, but good overall for end user performance. Cheers, Dean On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 12:44 AM, Michael Graff Andersen wrote: > Hello > > After our Netapp demo, I got curious what are the experiences of people > that have Netapp in production for backup ? > > Regards > Michael > > ___ > Veritas-bu maillist - Veritas-bu@mailman.eng.auburn.edu > http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu > > ___ Veritas-bu maillist - Veritas-bu@mailman.eng.auburn.edu http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu
Re: [Veritas-bu] Experiences with Netapp backups
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 ? ___ Veritas-bu maillist - Veritas-bu@mailman.eng.auburn.edu http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu
Re: [Veritas-bu] Experiences with Netapp backups
On Thu, 19 Feb 2009, Michael Graff Andersen wrote: > Hello > > After our Netapp demo, I got curious what are the experiences of people that > have Netapp in production for backup ? > > Regards > Michael > You need NDMP license to backup the data on it, it works well, never had any major issues with it, there was a 1TB file limitation per device/path, not sure if that exists anymore. Justin. ___ Veritas-bu maillist - Veritas-bu@mailman.eng.auburn.edu http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu
[Veritas-bu] Experiences with Netapp backups
Hello After our Netapp demo, I got curious what are the experiences of people that have Netapp in production for backup ? Regards Michael ___ Veritas-bu maillist - Veritas-bu@mailman.eng.auburn.edu http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu
