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:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, May 13, 2008 6:11 AM To: Jeff Lightner; veritas-bu@mailman.eng.auburn.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:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, May 12, 2008 6:03 PM To: WEAVER, Simon (external); veritas-bu@mailman.eng.auburn.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: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of WEAVER, Simon (external) Sent: Monday, May 12, 2008 11:13 AM To: veritas-bu@mailman.eng.auburn.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 This email (including any attachments) may contain confidential and/or privileged information or information otherwise protected from disclosure. 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