Ed
Its not really about SAN reliability. Its about the best practice to
locate the catalog. Is storing the catalog on a Production SAN with
Production Data the best method, or would it be feasible to locate the
catalog "outside" the production SAN.
Difference in recovery could vary. For example, if there was a SAN
outage, failure (whatever you want to define it), and production Data is
lost, including your Catalog then before ANY recovery takes place, you
have to bprecover (could take 40 - 2 hours depending on the size of the
catalog. I think one post noticed 1TB). Times are only an estimate.
If the Catalog was on its own SAN, or RAID+Hot Swap, it is one less step
involved to start recovery on production systems.
I am happy about the catalog on a RAID5, Hot swappable, and yes I have
seen a complete RAID set die, including a SAN environment totally
destroyed all known disk groups, complete unrecoverable data and loss of
catalog. What did not help was the lack of knowledge about recovering
netbackup and the catalog tape process.
If there is a document that symentec gives preference about the location
of a catalog then it would be nice to see it. I am guessing that as most
post's shows its on the SAN, its probably not a big deal.
I just look at it that from a DR point, keeping everything about
NetBackup grouped together, including the catalog.
Ed, 34 years old and probably older than yourself young man, but as
posted, some of the failures I have seen have been quite interesting to
see :-)
Thanks for your reply
Warm Regards
Simon
________________________________
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Ed Wilts
Sent: Tuesday, May 13, 2008 10:08 PM
To: WEAVER, Simon (external)
Cc: veritas-bu@mailman.eng.auburn.edu
Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] Best Practice: Location of the
NetBackupCatalog
On Mon, May 12, 2008 at 10:13 AM, WEAVER, Simon (external)
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Presently, I have NetBackup and the catalog installed locally,
on RAID5 set, hot swappable.
If you lose 2 drives in somewhat rapid succession, your catalog is gone.
The 2nd drive typically fails while you're rebuilding the RAIDset after
the first one dies due to the high load put on the drives. If you
haven't seen a double-disk failure yet, you're not old enough. Whether
the drives are hot swappable or not doesn't matter. What matters is
whether the RAID rebuild completes before the 2nd drive dies. The race
is on and sometimes the RAID rebuild doesn't complete in time.
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
If you lose SAN connectivity, you lose*access* to the catalog - you
don't lose the catalog.
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.
The likelihood of a well managed enterprise SAN destroying the data is
FAR less likely than a double-disk failure of a RAID-5 set. FAR, FAR,
FAR less.
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.
My catalog is on the SAN. It's replicated to another SAN array. It's
also backed up to tape and the recovery information is emailed to my
home email address (since my work email is also SAN-based).
If you can't trust the reliability of your SAN, get another SAN and/or
SAN admin. And I'm a SAN admin...
.../Ed
--
Ed Wilts, Mounds View, MN, USA
RHCE, BCFP, BCSD, SCSP
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