Backup Exec NDMP - Can we backup to disk?

[sameteeth]

We're planning to purchase Backup Exec with NDMP to backup our Netapp filer.  Can we backup to disk with NDMP? If not, what are setups  that are recommended? 

Thanks

[teiva-boy]

Yes you could.  However, you would need lots of storage, a 1:1 of your data.

Perhaps instead, backup the CIFS shares, and do media server dedupe?

[Soylent]

We have a Sun 7210 NAS which also supports NDMP. Will Backup Exec do a disk-to-disk backup of all the CIFS shares and LUNs?

[teiva-boy]

SUN is not currently supported NDMP device with BackupExec.   Only EMC, NetApp, and IBM are.
Refer to the Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) found on the support site, as it's updated almost bi-monthly.

You're only choice is to backup the cifs shares, or if used like a SAN (iSCSI is supported I believe) with LUNS provisioned out to other servers, the agents on those servers, would be able to backup those LUNS.

[Colin_Weaver]

Just to clarify NDMP Option backups to disk are only supported with Backup Exec 12.5 and above, 12.0 did not support this and I am not sure you need 1:1 storage as you can possibly enable software compression on the job.

Also if you try to do a CIFS level backup of data  on a SUN NAS, then you will need to make sure that either:
- the NDMP protocol on the SUN is disabled
- NMDP on the sun is changed to run on a different TCP Port
- all of the BackuP Exec windows servers (Media and Remote) have their NDMP TCP port changed to something else
You will also need a RAWS serial number on your media server.