Heterogeneous SAN Tape Solutions? 15
chasmosis asks:
"My company's decision to go with a heterogeneous SAN setup has
our DataCenter Engineers banging their head's against a wall.
Interoperability nightmares include matching microcode for various
components to achieve some level of stability. One of the biggest
current problems is with SAN connected
StorageTek tape libraries, anytime
a server scans the SAN for devices (ie on NT system boot,
an AIX machine running
cfgmgr ,
etc...) it accesses the tape drives, interrupting any currently
running backups. What have others done to make their SANs more
dependable, especially for backups/tapes?"
amanda (Score:1)
Go read, and re-read, how it actually plans and implements backups. You have to watch it run ( watch amstatus DailySet1 ) a few times to really grok it.
Re:amanda (Score:1)
amanda [amanda.org] Go read, and re-read, how it actually plans and implements backups. You have to watch it run ( $( which watch) amstatus DailySet1 ) a few times to really grok it.
I'm looking forward to Venti (Score:1)
Venti [bell-labs.com]
Anything but.. (Score:3, Informative)
Having had the fortune of using it for the last 4 years I can honestly say, while its gotten better, its still got a LOT of PROBLEMS.
Re:Anything but.. (Score:3, Informative)
90% of the problems were in the way it handled indexes for multihomed hosts; it would look for the index under the hostname of what you told it to backup and then dump the index under whatever 'hostname' returned. I did eventually find a workaround (by specifying the backup command to include the system name), but it was a PITA.
Re:Anything but.. (Score:1)
And someone mentioned Amanda, not in a SAN. It just doesn't cut the mustard. There is no way of importing and exporting a device over a SAN to each host. And if your gonna spend a TON of money on a SAN, get a freakin real backup product that has a support contract so you can get som assistance when things go bad. And does multiplexing and whatnot so you can fit your backups into the alloted window of time (which is why you got a SAN right).
Re:Anything but.. (Score:1)
Re:Anything but.. (Score:1)
Re:Anything but.. (Score:2)
Okay. Back in the real world - How did you like NetBackup? I know it at least has the same interface, wether you be in Unix or in Windows - one of the gripes i have about networker is that the "new" GUI (nwadmin.exe) isnt the same in any way shape or form of the old gui design, which is still used in unix.
The GUI itself blows. Bad, bad, bad design. No status indicators, inaccuracies abound.. Messages window in probably the WORST fuggin place..
And have you ever tried to correct a serious issue with legato tech support? I have. It took 8 bloody hours for them to respond to a serious inquiriy. What about a bare-metal restore of all your tapes? Read the man page on scanner - it's hell on earth. Hell, our sales guy wont even return our calls. Hows that for customer service? Buy 17,000 worth of products from them a year, and they dont even return your calls. We've already invested so much in legato, they won't allow us to move away from it right now. NOt until we're back in black ink, anyway.. But i will do everything in my power to see that nobody has to suffer through the hell of legato without being warned.
Granted, i don't have much power.
I feel ya.. I do SAN. (Score:1)
I had a customer who had the same damn problem exactly. Tech support a nightmare, no one at legartoo returning call. ick.
So when I installed their SAN and they asked me to integrate notworker with the SAN, i almost fell off the console laughing.. I sold them CA's BrightStor Enterprise Backup.. (I'd just been to their "training" the week previous. It's pretty damn close to ArcServe, minus a few bugs (including a few new ones, though)
Overall, they're happy. managing Solaris, HP-UX, and win2k with agents for their four(!) database platforms and such all from one console backing up to a pair of spectralogic libraries..
Use Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) (Score:2)
http://www.tivoli.com/products/solutions/storage/
Give it a try... works great! The downloadable server code comes with 30-day demo licenses...
Re:Use Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) (Score:1)