I would consider this experimental, and you might have to get hacky
with how your backup software starts up an NDMP session on the BlueArc
to do it, but it looks like the BlueArc NDMP server supports a 'level
10' or 'level I' (letter "eye") backup, which sounds like what you're
asking. (The ADC replication system for replicating a filesystem makes
use of this level, and we use it for that purpose.)

For us, level 10 will: * take a snapshot send all blocks changed between the previous snapshot and the just- taken snapshot delete the previous snapshot

so it effectively functions as a rolling incremental backup/ replication level.

On the SMU, look at the text file /usr/local/bin/adc.readme, starting
with the section: "NDMP Environment Variables for BlueArc Servers"; also in Appendix B
of the PDF admin guide.

Not sure if this will work just as well to tape; if you try it out,
test the heck out of it and make sure you can restore files properly
after the maximum number of incrementals-between-fulls that you plan
to use. You should run the setup by the BlueArc support folks, too,
just to make extra sure, but this sounds like it may be what you're
talking about.

Also, YMMV, protection of your data is your own responsibility, and be
very careful and test restores before relying on this for data
protection (unless BlueArc endorses this method, but test backups/ restores even if they do endorse it.).

I think this is a BlueArc specific feature, though; not sure if other
manufacturers would support it.

-Sven

On Mar 8, 2010, at 3:31 PM, J. J. Franzen wrote:

Right, that's what we are doing now. My big complaint about the
setup is there is no way to do a true incremental. Which means you
either have do to a full every 7 days to keep the dump sizes down
(which for a single LTO4 is impossible to do a full levle 0 dump of
a 34 TB volume in less then a week), or after a while the level 1
dump size gets to be so big it takes days to do it anyways.. I am
not a big fan of the whole NDMP protocol's dump level design. It's
very coarse and not at all tunable. I actually miss the days when I
could do an incremental to tape every 4 hours. With NDMP, that's
almost completely impossible. Unless I'm missing something in the
protocol. If anyone knows of a way to get a true incremental out of
NDMP, I would become your biggest fan...

J^2

On Mar 8, 2010, at 3:21 PM, Greg Whynott wrote:

just to tocuh on something you said, you can back up BlueArc
over FC via NDMP. I had my back end BlueArc FC switch connected
directly to our tape libs and was doing backups via NDMP, totally
avoiding the ethernet.

-g

From: studiosysadmins-discuss-bounces@mailman.studiosysadmins.com [studiosysadmins-discuss-bounces@mailman.studiosysadmins.com ] On Behalf Of Greg Whynott [Greg.Whynott@oicr.on.ca] Sent: Monday, March 08, 2010 6:19 PM To: discuss@studiosysadmins.com Subject: RE: Researching: Isilon and alternatives

only NetApp of the ones you mentioned. BlueArc is all NAS, as is
Isilon.

-g

From: studiosysadmins-discuss-bounces@mailman.studiosysadmins.com [studiosysadmins-discuss-bounces@mailman.studiosysadmins.com ] On Behalf Of J. J. Franzen [jjfranzen@mac.com] Sent: Monday, March 08, 2010 6:18 PM To: discuss@studiosysadmins.com Subject: Re: Researching: Isilon and alternatives

Actually, do any of the big guys (Netapp, Isilon, etc.) allow
direct FC access to their volumes? I know Blue Arc does not and am
curious if anyone else does. I would so love to do away with NDMP
for my backups and be able to do true incremental backups like in
the good ol days...

J^2

On Mar 8, 2010, at 3:18 PM, Ian Haskin wrote:

We're a small TV-commercial shop (3D/compositing, 20 people, with
50 or so machines, incl. 4 flames) that is outgrowing our home-built Linux
NAS. I'm looking for something scalable with high-bandwidth links for our
compositing nodes, with a tie-in to the rest of our 3D 1Gb-ethernet network.

-----Original Message----- From: studiosysadmins-discuss-bounces@mailman.studiosysadmins.com [mailto:studiosysadmins-discuss- bounces@mailman.studiosysadmins.com] On Behalf Of Barry Robison Sent: March-08-10 5:18 PM To: discuss@studiosysadmins.com Subject: Re: Researching: Isilon and alternatives

On Tue, Mar 9, 2010 at 9:00 AM, Ian Haskin ian@topixfx.com wrote: > I've been looking into Isilon storage and I'm quite impressed
> with their > sales-pitch. Can anyone share their experiences with Isilon
> products or any > other products that compete/compare with them? >

Hi Ian,

What is your budget and expected workload?

We evaluated both Isilon and BlueArc, with BlueArc winning our business. For our expected artist count (200) and farm size ( ~6k cores ), we liked BA better. We were sold on the data tiering, disaster recovery, and throughput the hardware architecture allows. From other shops we heard that BA was the only thing saturating
10GbE. We had issues getting Isilon working on 10GbE at all...

At a previous facility I worked at we used a small Isilon cluster
( 4 nodes ) quite happily. I think when you get up to the number of
nodes ( and accelerator nodes ) you need for a large cluster, some
problems can be expected.

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