Running Legato Networker and Veritas Netbackup simultaneously.

[Bigmikeo]

The department I work for runs restorations of data from outside
customers. We do not run backups. We have Legato Networker Backup
server version 6.1.3 running on our SUN-Fire-480R. We are using several
different tape drives on our server.

There are four standalone SDLT model 320 drives with SCSI connections.
There is one standalone LTO-2 with a SCSI connection.

We are utilizing tape drives in one StorageTek L700 tape silo. The tape
silo is controled by ACSLS. The ACSLS server runs on a Sun Solaris
V240.

Our SUN-Fire-480R uses seven tape drives in the L700 tape silo. Two STK
9840B drives, four STK 9840C drives, and one STK 9940A drive. All the
STK tape drives are accessed through fiber optic. Three of the drives
are connected to our SAN Network.

Do to a restoration scheduling conflict we need to know if it is
possible to install Veritas Netbackup "MEDIA SERVER" version 5.1 and
use it at the same time we are running Legato Networker Backup Server?

[Home and Small Business Techs - hasbtech.com]

The quick answer is no.

Neither program will play nice and relinquish control of the tape
device for the other. (I did this when working at Legato and doing
competitive analysis between the two and discovered how not nice they
play). You need a media abstraction program like SmartMedia (AlphaStor
is not capable of doing this). I am not sure if there is one that will
work with both NetBackup and NetWorker.

If you were so inclined, you could script it however; using shell
scripts to manipulate the jukeboxes and on-line/offline the devices.

-Kevin

[michael guldan]

Kevin,

I've not worked much with alphastor (only in existing environments).  Is it able to work with any other backup software at all?  I've always assumed not, but never played with it myself to find out. It seems pretty closely tied to the NetWorker media database.

_michael

[Home and Small Business Techs - hasbtech.com]

Michael,

AlphaStor is not really that closely tied to NetWorker's databases. It
currenly intercepts nsrjb calls and figures out what to do based on its
database and the request. In terms of other software, it works with
NetWorker and that is about it (unless you have REELS by STK; but that
may have been broken when NetWorker work was done on the product).

-Kevin

[michael guldan]

I thought it was a little more closely tied that that.  The intercepting of nsrjb calls makes sense tho.  If you've seen 7.3 or higher, you will notice that there is a "nsrlcpd" process that is the new "library control program daemon" that now handles library requests.  I understand that this came out of AlphaStor.

As far as other backup software support, I did just read somthing by chance on the EDM restore node where you use AlphaStor to share the library between EDM and NetWorker.  I don't know if EDM support is just to address the restore node functionality, or if they plan on adding support for other programs, but I thought it was interesting.




_m

[Home and Small Business Techs - hasbtech.com]

Actually nsrlcpd came from the smartmedia architecture, not
AlphaStor...

The EDM support is so EMC can drop EDM and thier customers can still
recover from volumes written to EDM tape. The process nsrmmgd has logic
in it to prevent NetWorker from labeling an EDM volume. As far as I
know there is no plan to support more than EDM and NetWorker in AS, but
then again, it has been over a year since I worked at Legato.

-Kevin