[BBLISA] Recommendation for NAS appliance?

[Edward Ned Harvey]

> And backups are sucky unless you do NDMP directly to tape.  But then
> restores suck suck suck because NDMP is just an encapsulation of the
> native dump/restore tools, which means scanning the tapes bit by bit
> to find and restore the file(s) you want to restore.  So in that case,
> snapshots make a huge difference.  Except when they expire and the
> user comes the next day with a restore request.

This was a huge win for us, in favor of ZFS.
Previously we had the NetApp with scsi attached tape library, controlled via
NDMP.  A total approx 1Tb storage used.  The backup window was approx 10 hrs
per night, and 30 hours for full backup on the weekend.  The scsi bus would
sometimes mess up and cause the system to crash or reboot, approx 2-3 times
a year, which should of course be zero.  Very annoying.

When we got the sun fileserver, we also bought some cheap Dell and installed
solaris on it too.  Hook up the tape autoloader to the Dell.  ZFS send to
the Dell, and from there backup to tape.  Now our backup window (zfs send)
is about 7 minutes per night, and about 10 hrs to do the full.  After that,
I don't know and don't care how long it takes to write the tapes, because
whatever the load is and however long it lasts, it's not happening on my
production system.  Even if the scsi bus crashes, no big deal because it's
just the secondary backup server, not the production server.

I can't emphasize this enough, it was a huge win to send snaps
server-to-server-to-tape.

Yes you could do the same thing with NetApp, but you would have to buy two
units, plus the SnapMirror licensing.  We are talking *way* more expensive
to do the same thing with the NetApp.


> 
> This is one of the biggest things that people overlook when they
> deploy storage like this, restore speed for single files.
> 
> We used to just backup the Filers over NFS with EMC/Legator Networker,
> which wasn't so fast on backup, but restores for single files were
> quick and *easy*.  And the file indexes lastest forever, which was
> nice because you could easily browse them looking for what you wanted.
> 
> I'd be happy to write even more about how I hate all backup products
> if you like.
> 
> Cheers,
> John