SAN & Power SNAP VS NDMP

[1018DADA]

We have struggled over last few monghts trying to find the best solution for backup of our proposed SAN.Our new configuration is going to be as below
1 Networker Windows 2003 server connected to ADIC i2000
with LTO2 drives on tape area network to the EMC Clirion SAN.
One storage node with same connections to same library as above, EMC Storage will be attached to SAN and NAS will be added for file sharing ( EMC NAS Gateways)& I-scsi connectivity.
I would like to know if some one else has a SAN similar to us up and running, what do you do for backup, do you do snapshots on SAN\NAS, do you do NDMP backups for Shares on NAS or do you backup EMC disk using Powersnap etc.
Please give me as mush details as possible and your experiance with SAN backups\restores and problems issues etc.

 

[sunixadm]

Hi,

We use DDS (Dinamic Drive Sharing) for SAN attached systesm and NDMP for our Celerra (NAS). We also use check points on the Celerra and keep 4 check points for the current day and one check point from each of the last 7 days. The check points are great as they reduce the amount of time to recover data deleted or changed by users. I would stay away from the snap shots on the clariion as the process requires the system to be "quite" before performing the snap.

Hope this helps!

-Joe

 

[1018DADA]

So If i understand you correctly, you do not backup Clarion Disk array, you just use snap shots ( check points) to rely on restores, what if you need to restore the entire EMC clarion disk array offsite, how will you acomplish this, not all your data on Clarion is shared over on Celerra and backed up via NDMP.
How is your NDMP backup performace ?
What backup systems do you employ, what are your backup time and sizes ? I appreciate your responce.

 

[Chacalinc]

1018, as I understand he don't rely on snapshots in the clariion for backups, he use Networker with DDS (Dinamic Drive Sharing), he use snapshots in the Celerra only to have good response times in recovery process, but he still use tapes for Celerra.

Chacal, Inc.