PureDisk and Lotus Domino Backups

[Rick_Back]

Hi all,

I'm planning to evaluate different ways to accelerate my remote Lotus Domino backups and I was wondering if Deduplication could fit. When talking about Lotus Domino, we need to face different challenges as it is barely a database on each NSF file, constantly under "maintenance" (defrag, compacts, etc). I believe this behaviour would impact directly PD's ability to hash/dedup NSF files. Am I right?

Another point is about online/offline backups. If we start a backup process for NSF files, and the backup agent is compatible with Lotus Domino (Veritas, EMC, TSM, etc), everything works fine. Does PureDisk provide a specific agent to Lotus Domino (using transactions logging, Domino APIs, etc)? If not, does it mean that with PureDisk I would be able to backup NSF files but only OFFLINE (shut down Lotus tasks)?

Anyway, I would like to hear from the folks out there the benefits, challenges, issues, alternatives, any kind of advice or experience is very welcomed (for Lotus Domino environments running on AIX boxes).

By the way, as PureDisk is a disk-only backup solution, I assume it doesn't export right to tape...Am I right? Looking to some posts here I understood PureDisk can export data to NBU, and from NBU it can be moved to tapes. How does it impact my ability to restore data? What's the performance of this export task? Once exported to NBU, is it actually deleted from PureDisk STU meaning the restore must be done from NBU STU (thus forcing me to have two different backup agents installed on my Domino servers)?

Sorry for so many questions, but I think it will cover pretty much all my doubts to prepare a project profile to my team.

Thanks a lot,

Rick

[Brian_Rawlings_]

Rick, de-duplication of any kind is never about speeding up your backups, and this is true of PureDisk as well.  De-duplication addresses a different need, storage and network efficiency, and the desire to keep backups on disk rather than "somewhere" on tape.

So, if you're really trying to speed up your remote Lotus backups, I doubt that anyone would suggest using PureDisk (or any de-dup facility) to achieve your goal.  Where PureDisk comes in to help solve most people's remote office backup problem is by doing a de-duplicated backup over the WAN/VPN from remote locations, and getting rid of tape altogether for your remote backups and restores.

If you are using the term "remote" to mean "my other data center", rather than a bunch of remote offices, the picture changes somewhat.  IF Puredisk is in you Data Center (either local or remote), and is being used as one of the many types of storage repository for NBU, NOW you have some very good options to increase the speed of your Lotus backups using Netbackup and its Lotus agent, together with one of our options for letting the Lotus server backups happen over fibre channel.  

Once again, however, even in the Data Center, using PureDisk as the backup repository (via Netbackup Media Server de-duplication option) is not going to be your fastest backup.  It will be a good place to keep disk-based backups for weeks or months, rather than just a day or two, but the compromise there is speed.  

In a typical Netbackup design that incorporates PureDisk, you will nearly always want to also have some high speed DAS or SAN storage attached to the media servers, and you will use those for your initial high-speed backup.  After the backup has been on high-speed storage for a day or two, however, you'll need to free that space up for the next backup, so you'll migrate the backup to PureDisk for longer term storage (but a lengthier recovery period).  That way, you get fast backups, with fast restores for the short term, and longer term medium speed restore from disk.  Eventually, for archiving purposes, you roll off  the full backups to tape and free up any backup disk space for newer backups.

I  hope this helps.

Best Regards, --bmr 

[Rick_Back]

Hi Brian,

First of all, thanks for your reply. It was a very good one. Dedup was my line of thought because there are a good number of remote offices, and most of them does not have a good comm link to the datacenter.

Comparing a Dedup'd backup vs Traditional Backup, I understood Dedup would make it faster not during the transfer itself as the link will remain the same, but with a Full Dedup'd backup my perception is that I'll have less data to transport over the wire (then make my backups shorter).

As I understood from your reply, PureDisk won't help me shorten my Lotus Domino backup windows, as it is not the fastest backup (compared to Netbackup) and actually provides a slower recovery as well? Am I right? If it's the case, what do Symantec thinks as the best guess to shorten Lotus Domino backup windows sitting on remote offices? One of my goals is to minimize acquisition costs for each remote office (licenses, disks, tapes, libraries, SAN, etc)...

Anyway, the scenario you proposed is very good and helped me understand additional things.

Thanks again,

Ricardo