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Replication Director

Joel_Delaney
Level 2

I am looking to see if a core workflow of my backup environment can be configured in Replication Director.

Environment components:

  • Multiple Netapp filers (6280s OnTap 8.x in 7mode)
  • One Netbackup master server (Windows 2003)
  • Two Netbackup media servers (one Windows 2003 and one OLE 6)
  • LTO4 tape drives in a robotic library

Current situation:

On the primary filer I take hourly snapshots of a volume and retain them for a rolling 24; a daily snapshot is taken and retained for rolling 7 days. Nightly; I snapvault a daily snapshot to a secondary filer and keep that for 5 weeks. On a weekly schedule I backup the volume on this secondary filer to tape.

This solution is managed by many tools and there is not central console to monitor and report the end to end successes (or failures, let’s be honest). Replication Director seems to be the tool for this. Can I use it to achieve my desired result?

Desired result:

  1. Netbackup schedules and initiates the hourly and daily snapshots on the primary storage volume.
  2. Netbackup schedules and initiates the snapvault to the secondary volume on another filer nightly.
  3. Netbackup schedules and executes tape backups of the secondary volume weekly to tape.

Man that sounds like a dream come true.

 Thank you in adavance interwebs for any input you offer,

Joel Delaney

 

 

4 REPLIES 4

CRZ
Level 6
Employee Accredited Certified

Have you scoped out our documentation yet?

Symantec NetBackup Replication Director 7.5 Solutions Guide
 http://symantec.com/docs/DOC5191

That TechNote also contains a video link with a configuration demo.

Anshu_Pathak
Level 5

Replication Director (RD) can perform all the tasks that you have mentioned however the time when you want these tasks to be performed could pose challenges in NetBackup 7.5

Netbackup 7.5

NetBackup uses Storage Lifecycle Policy (SLP) to implement RD feature. You cannot control schedules in SLP. it will automatically start the Operation 2 (snapvault) after checking two parameters -- which are 30 minutes from Operation 1 or 8 GB backup data ---- so the point is you will not be able to schedule operation 2 to run only during night and operation 3 to run during weekends.

NetBackup 7.6

NetBackup 7.6 (coming release) has a feature where you can add and control scheduling of SLP. In this release you will be able to perform Operation 1 (hourly snapshots) using backup policy schedule and Operation 2 (nightly snapvaults) using SLP schedule and Operation 3 (Backup to tape) using SLP schedule successfully.

rharriso
Level 2
Employee Accredited

Hi, Joel, my name is Richard Harrison and I am the Product Manager for Replication Director (RD).  RD was designed for exactly the sort of environment you describe.  Your described use case is supported by RD. 

The point about NBU 7.5 vs. 7.6 is relevant: in 7.5 the supported environments are NetApp NAS and file system data.  In 7.6 RD adds support for VMware on NFS datastores, for Exchange and SQL Server in VMware, for non-virtualized Oracle servers connected to NAS via NFS (db files live on NAS) in addition to some other features including SLP Windows as mentioned by Anshu.

If you have more questions, feel free to get help from your account team, or if that isn't your preference, contact me directly and I will get you whatever help you require.

Thanks!

Richard Harrison

V4
Level 6
Partner Accredited

Hi Richard

 

Does Rep Director 7.5 supports NetAPP v 6080 series with OnTAP 8.x and above? 

or has 7.6 extended proliferation to cover above family as well?