Avamar back-up of Isilon: Newbie question

[GAZ]

Do any of you esteemed Isilon gurus know what it will take for me to back up my CIFS shares on the Isilon device with my Avamar backup platform?  I am hoping there is the equivalent of an NDMP back-up or something.  I assume I have to buy a client or license component.  Referring me to links of existing posts or pages is welcome.  I am having trouble finding what we will need to purchase.

[LinuxRox]

i was told just today that you can use Avamar NDMP proxy to backup Isilon via NDMP

On Wed, Jan 23, 2013 at 5:49 PM, GAZ <greg...@yahoo.com> wrote:

Do any of you esteemed Isilon gurus know what it will take for me to back up my CIFS shares on the Isilon device with my Avamar backup platform?  I am hoping there is the equivalent of an NDMP back-up or something.  I assume I have to buy a client or license component.  Referring me to links of existing posts or pages is welcome.  I am having trouble finding what we will need to purchase.

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[Jerry Uanino]

Isilon supports NDMP.

For oneFS 7

http://doc.isilon.com/onefs/7.0.0/help/en-us/index.html?topic=GUID-A803BB51-C746-4FA6-ADC0-5856F60AE82B&sn=R101400020J

I don't believe it's an extra license on the Isilon side, I can't speak to the Avamar side of it. It should be a similar license to Netapp NDMP or whatever other devices you have for your backup software.

On Wed, Jan 23, 2013 at 5:49 PM, GAZ <greg...@yahoo.com> wrote:

Do any of you esteemed Isilon gurus know what it will take for me to back up my CIFS shares on the Isilon device with my Avamar backup platform?  I am hoping there is the equivalent of an NDMP back-up or something.  I assume I have to buy a client or license component.  Referring me to links of existing posts or pages is welcome.  I am having trouble finding what we will need to purchase.

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[Erik Weiman]

Isilon doesn't need any license for ndmp. You can use 3-way ndmp over SMB (i believe its SMB anyways) on any cluster. Or you can purchase a backup accelerator and use the cluster to backup directly over fiber channel to lto4 and other drives. 

Erik Weiman 

Sent from my iPhone 4

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[Jerry Uanino]

I don't think it's SMB... NDMP is it's own protocol.  It should be NDMP protocol from isilon to backup server, then the "third" part of 3-way is usually whatever your backup target is (tape, disk, etc).  Then again, I'm not familiar with Avamar.

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[GAZ]

Excellent.  I have an EMC guy coming out to help with the Avamar next week.  I will be able to have NDMP enabled on the Isilon in advance.

[Keith Nargi]

If you are looking to backup Isilon I would highly recommend doing a 3 way ndmp job using Networker to Data Domain.  Isilon doesn't work with Avamar today.  The integration between the 2 products is on the horizon but I can't speak to when it will be actually supported.  Avamar currently supports 40TB files systems and Isilon as you all know is a filesystem that grows well beyond that 40TB filesystem mark.  I would definitely leverage ndmp to back the cluster up but I would work with your EMC rep and SE's to pick the appropriate backup platform. 

Keith

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[GAZ]

On Wednesday, January 23, 2013 5:47:36 PM UTC-6, Keith wrote:

If you are looking to backup Isilon I would highly recommend doing a 3 way ndmp job using Networker to Data Domain.  Isilon doesn't work with Avamar today.  The integration between the 2 products is on the horizon but I can't speak to when it will be actually supported.  Avamar currently supports 40TB files systems and Isilon as you all know is a filesystem that grows well beyond that 40TB filesystem mark.  I would definitely leverage ndmp to back the cluster up but I would work with your EMC rep and SE's to pick the appropriate backup platform. 

Keith

Ok.  Bad news.  This client already bought the Avamar and Isilon.  We'll have to figure something out...

[Skylar Thompson]

I feel compelled to give the general NDMP warning - make very, very
certain in your DR planning that you will be able to get another Isilon
box to do the restore, if you lose your current one. NDMP locks you into
restoring on to the particular storage platform you took the backup from.

We do all our Isilon backups over NFS (we don't use ACLs or other NT
stuff) so that we can do our restores to any platform, and also do
incrementals forever (we're a TSM shop, and have enough data we could
never do a full).

My impression of NDMP is that it's designed by storage vendors to get
you to buy lots of storage, preferably their own.

Skylar

[LinuxRox]

imagine TSM client crawling through Isilon file systems with millions and millions of inodes, that's why people use NDMP

Skylar

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[Skylar Thompson]

On 01/23/2013 05:31 PM, LinuxRox wrote:
> imagine TSM client crawling through Isilon file systems with millions and
> millions of inodes, that's why people use NDMP

Not a problem - we structure our data such that we can assign specific
directories to different TSM client threads. Last night, we examined 20
million files on our smaller Isilon cluster, and 34 million on our
larger one. The longest-running thread took 6 hours to complete.

Skylar

[Jerry Uanino]

I have a ZFS device I use straight NFS backups instead of NDMP on.... however..... if you have several million files, NDMP backups will be faster.  Yes, restores must be to an NDMP device.  I *think* you can NDMP copy between Isilon and Netapp, so I'm wondering if you might be able to do a restore from one to the other.  Not that you'd really want to do this (except  for migrations) but it might be handy to know for emergency restores.

The NDMP protocol is an open standard I believe.

On Wed, Jan 23, 2013 at 8:22 PM, Skylar Thompson <skylar....@gmail.com> wrote:

Skylar

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[LinuxRox]

you can't restore NDMP backup from Celerra to NetApp for example so i don't see how Isilon and NetApp are different

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[Skylar Thompson]

On 01/23/2013 05:38 PM, Jerry Uanino wrote:
> I have a ZFS device I use straight NFS backups instead of NDMP
> on.... however..... if you have several million files, NDMP backups
> will be faster. Yes, restores must be to an NDMP device. I
> *think* you can NDMP copy between Isilon and Netapp, so I'm
> wondering if you might be able to do a restore from one to the
> other. Not that you'd really want to do this (except for
> migrations) but it might be handy to know for emergency restores.

Yeah, I've heard conflicting information on this, enough so that I'd
be willing to believe that there might be pairs of compatible NDMP
storage, but I'm doubtful that any vendor is compatible with any
other. Certainly if I were recovering from a disaster, I'd want to
know exactly what I need to buy. That we can restore to any UNIX or
NFS target is a big plus, because it means we can go with some other
vendor for storage down the road.

> The NDMP protocol is an open standard I believe.

Yeah, although it's stacked strongly in favor of more storage:

1. No support for incremental-forever. Taking a full occasionally
means using way more storage.
2. No support for include/exclude lists. We exclude about
three-quarters of our Isilon systems from backups. Combine this with
#1, this would mean an order-of-magnitude increase in our backup
occupancy if we went to NDMP.

We have a bit over 2PB in Isilon storage, plus another 1.5PB or so in
other NDMP-capable devices (mostly BlueARC) that we also backup using
NFS. We have about 3PB in backups between all our storage at six month
retention. I'd estimate switching to NDMP we'd bump that up to about
30PB, even if we only took a full backup every month.

Skylar

[Jerry Uanino]

Bonus points for whoever tries it first. ;-)
I think Netapp's NDMP images are standard "unix backup/restore" images, using NDMP as the transport.
Now I'm really curious.

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[Richard Kunert]

We are using include/exclude lists for NDMP backups from our Isilon (with Backup Exec, which actually works OK). We back up about a third of the data on our ~400 TB cluster, the rest is considered expendable - six months of historical data that we keep as a courtesy to our users in case they ask for it.

I'm not thrilled about the device-specific aspect of NDMP but it is fast. For fulls I can stream directly to LTO-4 tape. For incrementals we have to copy to disk first as there is too much start / stop in the data flow. Incremental forever would be nice but I don't trust Backup Exec quite enough for that. It works fine if you stick to the basics.

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Richard

[Skylar Thompson]

Interesting - maybe the lack of include/exclude lists is specific to TSM/Isilon/NDMP and not other backup vendors. When I went through the Isilon/TSM integration documentation I could find no mention of configuring include/exclude lists.

Out of curiosity, how complex can you make your include/exclude rules?

Skylar

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[Richard Kunert]

You can keep on adding include/exclude rules as long as you want, but I keep them simple because the Backup Exec interface for editing them is horrible. Basically we have a few very large directories to back up (mainly DNA sequencer data directories) and I do them separately.

Backup Exec is a product that we had on hand when we bought the Isilon cluster but if I was starting from scratch I would look at other solutions. It is MUCH cheaper than most software that can do NDMP backups, and you can install it and get it running in a couple of hours. But the advanced features tend to be dicey and the support is just plain bad (thank you, nice man in India, for keeping me on the phone for an hour and sending me all of those irrelevant links). Still, as long as we stick to the basics and don't get too fancy it just keeps on working.

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[J. Lasser]

But that's just it -- there are no standard "unix backup/restore"
images. All that is, is equivalent to output of 'dump', which is
filesystem-determined. Hence the platform-specific nature of
dump/restore as well as NDMP.

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--
Jon Lasser j...@lasser.org 206-326-0614
. . . and the walls became the world all around . . . (Maurice Sendak)

[GAZ]

I had to proxy this and back this up as a UNC through a Windows host.  If you search Avamar's technical sites for the oddities and particulars in configuring this type of data set.  For one thing, you can only have one UNC path per data set.

[Jeff]

Just got around to reading this thread and I'm quite interested in what Skylar is doing and the NDMP portions as well.  

The shop I worked in till about a year ago was doing backups to TSM via NDMP from a BlueArc NAS.  As you can guess, the millions of files became a big issue for us there and backups were taking days - if they even completed.  The work around was to create virtual file systems and break the entire process into jobs that handled less than 4TB.  The drawback, backups were no longer nightly for any of the file systems, rather once a week.

Further, we found that restoring files was a maddening process as well as it took forever and a day for TSM to build the TOC from which to even find the item(s) you were looking for (god forbid you selected a wrong Point In Time).

In my current position, we have two Isilon clusters one for DR the other for production data.  I use SyncIQ from prod to DR and then via NFS mounted file systems backup to TSM.  Given my previous experience with NDMP, in part, I did not even consider it for the Isilons.  Further the TSM server we backup to, is a campus wide system and I do not have admin rights.  

We will be considering other options over the coming year and Avamar is something I want to consider, however, given the revelations in this thread it may not be a prime choice.

[GAZ]

On Tuesday, March 26, 2013 1:18:00 PM UTC-5, Jeff wrote:

Just got around to reading this thread and I'm quite interested in what Skylar is doing and the NDMP portions as well.  

The shop I worked in till about a year ago was doing backups to TSM via NDMP from a BlueArc NAS.  As you can guess, the millions of files became a big issue for us there and backups were taking days - if they even completed.  The work around was to create virtual file systems and break the entire process into jobs that handled less than 4TB.  The drawback, backups were no longer nightly for any of the file systems, rather once a week.

Further, we found that restoring files was a maddening process as well as it took forever and a day for TSM to build the TOC from which to even find the item(s) you were looking for (god forbid you selected a wrong Point In Time).

In my current position, we have two Isilon clusters one for DR the other for production data.  I use SyncIQ from prod to DR and then via NFS mounted file systems backup to TSM.  Given my previous experience with NDMP, in part, I did not even consider it for the Isilons.  Further the TSM server we backup to, is a campus wide system and I do not have admin rights.  

We will be considering other options over the coming year and Avamar is something I want to consider, however, given the revelations in this thread it may not be a prime choice.

The Avamar is great if you need something complex and have too large of a budget and need to spend it or lose it.  Otherwise, I'd avoid it.  It's interface is stupid, the logs are in XML format so it's super hard to find failures, and the client configuration is cumbersome.  It took me two days to complete a test restore on a preproduction Exchange server.  If you are used to TSM, you may have  become sufficiently desensitized to overly complex backup solutions so it may not seem so bad to you.

The positive is that it's fast after the first backup.