Alas, yes, I've already tunneled down that rabbit hole. We are using BakBone's Netvault for tape backup, and their NDMP plugin has no concept of a level 10 dump. You can't put the value in via the GUI, and if you try to hack the job def file, it will throw an error. I've already sent a couple requests to BA to open up access to the level 10 NDMP extension they created and I've also made a request to BakBone to add support to their NDMP plugin for it. I would love to see a "movement" that would push the NDMP protocol into the modern age and have a "level 10" type dump actually become part of the standard NDMP protocol. Anyone wanna start a rally? :) Seriously though, with volume sizes growing into the 100 of TBs and even in some cases PBs (I'm looking at you WETA), there has to be a better why of implementing tape archive then the current NDMP standard that doesn't involve massive tape libraries with dozens of drives and insane levels of sub volume NDMP dumps. Maybe I should break this off into it's own thread...

J^2

On Mar 9, 2010, at 3:07 PM, Sven Nielsen wrote:

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.

Good luck, -Barry _ StudioSysAdmins-Discuss mailing list StudioSysAdmins-Discuss@mailman.studiosysadmins.com http://mailman.studiosysadmins.com/mailman/listinfo/studiosysadmins-discuss

_ StudioSysAdmins-Discuss mailing list StudioSysAdmins-Discuss@mailman.studiosysadmins.com http://mailman.studiosysadmins.com/mailman/listinfo/studiosysadmins-discuss

_ StudioSysAdmins-Discuss mailing list StudioSysAdmins-Discuss@mailman.studiosysadmins.com http://mailman.studiosysadmins.com/mailman/listinfo/studiosysadmins-discuss __ StudioSysAdmins-Discuss mailing list StudioSysAdmins-Discuss@mailman.studiosysadmins.com http://mailman.studiosysadmins.com/mailman/listinfo/studiosysadmins-discuss __ StudioSysAdmins-Discuss mailing list StudioSysAdmins-Discuss@mailman.studiosysadmins.com http://mailman.studiosysadmins.com/mailman/listinfo/studiosysadmins-discuss

_ StudioSysAdmins-Discuss mailing list StudioSysAdmins-Discuss@mailman.studiosysadmins.com http://mailman.studiosysadmins.com/mailman/listinfo/studiosysadmins-discuss

_ StudioSysAdmins-Discuss mailing list StudioSysAdmins-Discuss@mailman.studiosysadmins.com http://mailman.studiosysadmins.com/mailman/listinfo/studiosysadmins-discuss

---

StudioSysAdmins-Discuss mailing list StudioSysAdmins-Discuss@mailman.studiosysadmins.com http://mailman.studiosysadmins.com/mailman/listinfo/studiosysadmins-discuss