NDMP over a WAN via IP using Tivoli Storage Manager (EMC)

I know this might sound nuts, however, We have just put a celerra in place
in our environment and looking to back it up via NDMP... (thats the easy
part)

The hard part is, that our tape silos are a few miles away and my mgmt is
asking if NDMP can be used to backup this celera over the WAN. Now I know
that certain flavors of veritas can accomplish this with a Net App, however
I have yet to see this done with TSM and an EMC data mover....

Can anyone comment on this type of architecture?

Thanks in advance.

Fred

On Thu, 5 Jan 2006 19:33:11 -0500, "Fred" wrote:

I know this might sound nuts, however, We have just put a celerra in place
in our environment and looking to back it up via NDMP... (thats the easy
part)

Despite what some people may have told you these are actually pretty
sad excuses for NAS, and expensive.

Honestly, who decided to buy these things?


The hard part is, that our tape silos are a few miles away and my mgmt is
asking if NDMP can be used to backup this celera over the WAN. Now I know
that certain flavors of veritas can accomplish this with a Net App, however
I have yet to see this done with TSM and an EMC data mover....

Can anyone comment on this type of architecture?

Thanks in advance.

Fred


Given you've got TSM has any thought been given to doing infinite
incrementals over NFS instead of NDMP? It would save on your WAN
traffic and would be easier to stage to disk at the destination for
faster tape throughput.

Of course, if you've got NTFS permissions in there I've got no
suggestion beyond your NDMP plan (which will work of course, it'll
just likely be painful).

~F

Hey Guys! Thanks so much for your feedback.

I guess to clarify a bit more, in regards to WAN bandwidth, we have OC3's
inter-site and LTO-3 drives, so speed for streaming to tape would not be an
issue, also Disk staging is actually currently utilized however, not for
this particular backup cycle.. What I guess the underlying issue here is if
it can actually be completed by using ndmp over ip. We are looking for the
fastest possible solution that is supported by TSM over this wire. If you
guys have any doc's case studies or anything depicting how to accomplish
this, i would more than greatly appreciate it.

I was also thinking about iscsi options... can you guys comment on this as
well.... Moving forward, approximately 20TB of data will be housed on the
celerra. Doing a delta backup will definitely yield advantages, however im
sure that some sarbanes oxley compliance requirement will creep up where at
least one full backup is necessary.

(Sigh) It was basically another case of managemnt making purchase decisions
based on incentives and not talking to the tech folk that they pay to put
this stuff in place!!!

Thanks again.....

Fred


"HVB" wrote in message
...
On Fri, 06 Jan 2006 01:23:45 GMT, Faeandar wrote:

On Thu, 5 Jan 2006 19:33:11 -0500, "Fred" wrote:

I know this might sound nuts, however, We have just put a celerra in
place
in our environment and looking to back it up via NDMP... (thats the easy
part)

Despite what some people may have told you these are actually pretty
sad excuses for NAS, and expensive.

Pah! They are expensive, but not always as expensive as NetApp. Of
course, they're feature poor compared to NetApp, but in some
environments the Celerra fits right in. EMC never wanted the Celerra
to be all things to all people, it's a niche product for them.

In the right environment they can offer high performance, highly
reliable NAS services. Not to say that they haven't had problems, but
that happens to everyone.

Faeandar didn't say it, but I suspect will agree... NetApp products
rock and IME they fit ~99% of people's requirements. YMMV.

Honestly, who decided to buy these things?

At a guess I'd say it was a commercial decision, knowing the way EMC
usually do business.

HVB

On Fri, 6 Jan 2006 11:26:15 -0500, "Fred" wrote:

Hey Guys! Thanks so much for your feedback.

I guess to clarify a bit more, in regards to WAN bandwidth, we have OC3's
inter-site and LTO-3 drives, so speed for streaming to tape would not be an
issue, also Disk staging is actually currently utilized however, not for
this particular backup cycle.. What I guess the underlying issue here is if
it can actually be completed by using ndmp over ip. We are looking for the
fastest possible solution that is supported by TSM over this wire. If you
guys have any doc's case studies or anything depicting how to accomplish
this, i would more than greatly appreciate it.

I was also thinking about iscsi options... can you guys comment on this as
well.... Moving forward, approximately 20TB of data will be housed on the
celerra. Doing a delta backup will definitely yield advantages, however im
sure that some sarbanes oxley compliance requirement will creep up where at
least one full backup is necessary.

What were you thinking about exactly? iSCSI is a host based access
protocol, not a backup protocol.

~F


(Sigh) It was basically another case of managemnt making purchase decisions
based on incentives and not talking to the tech folk that they pay to put
this stuff in place!!!

Thanks again.....

Fred


"HVB" wrote in message
.. .
On Fri, 06 Jan 2006 01:23:45 GMT, Faeandar wrote:

On Thu, 5 Jan 2006 19:33:11 -0500, "Fred" wrote:

I know this might sound nuts, however, We have just put a celerra in
place
in our environment and looking to back it up via NDMP... (thats the easy
part)

Despite what some people may have told you these are actually pretty
sad excuses for NAS, and expensive.

Pah! They are expensive, but not always as expensive as NetApp. Of
course, they're feature poor compared to NetApp, but in some
environments the Celerra fits right in. EMC never wanted the Celerra
to be all things to all people, it's a niche product for them.

In the right environment they can offer high performance, highly
reliable NAS services. Not to say that they haven't had problems, but
that happens to everyone.

Faeandar didn't say it, but I suspect will agree... NetApp products
rock and IME they fit ~99% of people's requirements. YMMV.

Honestly, who decided to buy these things?

At a guess I'd say it was a commercial decision, knowing the way EMC
usually do business.

HVB

If you are interested in "STRETCHING" the fabirc - this can / could be
achived by using kit such as McData SAN routers or Cisco MDS...

You have ethernet ports on these units that allow you to run FC over
IP - I would also recommend you put these into a different fabric, as
latency may cause issue and also if you have state changes due to
network issues, you dont want items such as FSCN's sent over the
complete sets of fabrics that you are using for production

with regards to NDMP - should be as good as gold with celerra -
although its performance is not as good as you would have seen with
NetApp.

Cheers,

S.



On Thu, 5 Jan 2006 19:33:11 -0500, "Fred" wrote:

I know this might sound nuts, however, We have just put a celerra in place
in our environment and looking to back it up via NDMP... (thats the easy
part)

The hard part is, that our tape silos are a few miles away and my mgmt is
asking if NDMP can be used to backup this celera over the WAN. Now I know
that certain flavors of veritas can accomplish this with a Net App, however
I have yet to see this done with TSM and an EMC data mover....

Can anyone comment on this type of architecture?

Thanks in advance.

Fred

I may be answering this a bit late, but I thought I'd chime in since
I've attempted to setup NDMP backups with Celerra and TSM.

The Celerra is certainly capable of NDMP, and NDMP is the best solution
if you're mixed-mode access on your Celerra-- both CIFS and NFS on the
same filesystem. Also NDMP can provide better performance than network
backups-- especially when you're dealing with lots of files.

Now, how you'll do this over the WAN is of some concern. Do you mean
your backup server is across the WAN, but you tapedrive is local? or
are both tape drive and backup server across the WAN? If the latter,
you could to use FCIP to connect your tape to your Celerra as has been
suggested below. Another option could be to use the Celerra's built-in
VTLU (virtual tape library) to stream NDMP backups from the datamover
to itself, and then clone/vault those tapes to your TSM.

The problem I think you'll run into, though, is that although TSM does
only incrementals, AFAIK (and I was looking at this about 9mo ago) TSM
doesn't support incremental NDMP backups-- the whole NDMP image (each
FS) is backed up as a single file. Also, TSM didn't support the BC
modules with NDMP... Therefore you'd be looking at nightly fulls...
You can use checkpoints to reduce the number of backups you do, but
you'll have to work w/ IBM to see if this is still true, and whether or
not this will be acceptable. In contrast incremental NDMP backups work
fine w/ Networker or Netbackup.

I'm not sure why TSM's NDMP support sucked so much... I kind of figured
it was because their AIX based NAS-heads didn't support it... but
that's just my guess...

HTH
Aaron