What are your thoughts/experiences with NDMP?

[markey164]

Hi all,

I'm curious as to your personal experiences, and general opinion of NDMP with regard to it's performance and reliability etc.

I have an NDMP Filer (Netapp) here, connected directly to my MA via fibre and experience all sorts of problems. Backup is about 12TB.

Whilst it essentially works, we often get communication issues between the filer, the MA and it's drives. It's never clear where the problem lies, we often end up rebooting everything, to clear the fault.

We also find that NDMP jobs dont recover well from these failures, or network failures in general. Jobs fail, tapes get deprecated en masse, stale sessions build up on the Filer. I find myself checking for deprecated tapes and stale NDMP sessions every couple of days pretty much.

However in comparison, backing up our servers is almost faultless. We backup about 100 Windows and *nix boxes and these just work.

In general my experience of managing NDMP backups and its associated issues is not great.

Am i alone, or are other admins battling with NMDP backups out there?

 

[CraigMcGill]

No issues at our site. It all does work. I think you probably have some software config issues or, more likely, some hardware config/incompatibility issues. With tricky multi-vendor problems like yours, I've had good success getting all relevant vendors in for a meeting and telling them to work amongst themselves to fix it.

 

[SirFalstaff]

The OP could be describing my experience with NDMP, except we have a BlueArc.

I have _not_ had good luck getting the CV developers and hardware vendors to work out solutions. The discussions tended to break down into finger pointing as to what was at fault.

So now I basically muddle through and wish we had bought another solution.