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rsamora's avatar
rsamora
Level 5
12 years ago
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Protecting an 11TB NetApp Volume

I've seen some older discussions on this topic but I'm asking to see if anyone has any new suggestions.

Master Server - Windows Server 2008 R2

The data is on a NetApp device with tape drives directly connected and I'm using NDMP backup policies.  The volume in question is 11TB and growing, and contains (are you ready for it) millions of small files. 

Depending on which device I use, D2D or VTL, my backups range anywhere from 26 hours to 50 hours.  I'm tasked with replicating everything over to the DR site within 24 hours.  Obviously, if I have a backup that runs 26+ hours, I'm going to miss that 24 hour target.  I want to retain the ability to recover single files.


Any recommendations?  I don't believe backups were ever meant to protect that much data in a single volume without using some kind of snapshot technology which would elminate the ability to restore single files.

Any suggestions (or other job opportunities depending on how this goes) would be greatly appreciated.

  • If you can move to a LUN hosted off a server and not CIFS/NFS off your filer, you could use an Enterprise Client and FlashBackup (Or is it FlashSnap?).  Thats about your only realistic option short of not backing it up and using a snap and replicate strategy.

    I do though have a customer that does snap and replicate, and backs up on the remote end, even though it takes 6 days for a full backup to be completed.  They have 500+ Million FIles, use NBU and way too much NDMP to be comfortable about the recovery aspect of it...

  • Today, with the growing size of disk space used on filers, we see increase in other methods of data protection than backup to tape. In the case of NBU and NetApp, you could use NBU Replication Director to control SnapVault replication to secondary/n-ary filer, and to NBU storage units. Duplication to tape is too heavy on most filers, so this is seldom a feasable option when talking about many TB and millions of files. Your other option, if your setup allows, is to use the block level backup of NetApp volumes, more specifically SM2T (SnapMirror to tape) is one of the most efficient methods to send a lot of data to tape. This method is not geared to single-file restore scenarios though, as you would have to restore a whole volume to get the files you want. I would recommend 2nd and 3rd copy of your data on other NetApp filers, data movement perhaps controlled by NBU. You can then spread your tape backups (if still a requirement), on multiple filers. /A