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Heterogeneous SAN Tape Solutions?

Posted by Cliff on from the fixing-the-problems dept.

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?"

15 comments

  1. amanda by iamcadaver · · Score: 1

    amanda< p>
    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.

    --
    Before I part with'em: two pennies weigh ~4.996+/-0.014g, have a zinc core, and the face of Lincoln. You can keep 'em.
    1. Re:amanda by iamcadaver · · Score: 1
      ( who decided to put [submit] right next to [preview] )

      amanda 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.

      --
      Before I part with'em: two pennies weigh ~4.996+/-0.014g, have a zinc core, and the face of Lincoln. You can keep 'em.
  2. I'm looking forward to Venti by DrSkwid · · Score: 1

    those crazy plan9 guys at Bell Labs have talen care of the problem for me

    Venti

    --
    There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
  3. Anything but.. by AnalogBoy · · Score: 3, Informative

    Legato Notworker!

    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.

    1. Re:Anything but.. by larien · · Score: 3, Informative
      Urgh; amen. We just upgraded our backup server and I had the dubious pleasure of setting it up.

      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.

    2. Re:Anything but.. by xinu · · Score: 1
      Exactly. We are being forced to move from Veritas NetBackup to Legato. I remember using Legato like 7 years ago or so and still have nightmares. But Veritas NetBackup with a Brocade switch setup is the most ideal. Veritas uses flat files for indexes (which does have an option for compression, but slows things down when doing reads). And stay away from JNI fibre channel cards, nothing but problems with them too, use Emulex cards for both SBUS and PCI.

      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).

    3. Re:Anything but.. by xinu · · Score: 1

      oh, and I use a StorageTek L180. We affectionitely nicknamed it Barney cuz of it's pretty purple color (which looks nice next to all the purple Clarrion storage arrays next to it). Works great for me backup up several hundred Solaris and NT servers.

    4. Re:Anything but.. by xinu · · Score: 1

      I could go on for days about this. Sorry. But don't forget to do some intelligent zoning on the switches so that NT doesn't just grab the device off of the SAN. I had NT grabbing devices out from underneath Solaris when I first tried getting it going. And if you use EMC stuff check out the product called Access Logix which does something similar to zoning on switches.

    5. Re:Anything but.. by AnalogBoy · · Score: 2

      Its open source! of *COURSE* it will cut the mustard.. if it doesn't, write your own extensions!

      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.

  4. Use Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) by nbvb · · Score: 2

    TSM is an _excellent_ backup product, and works great with SAN's...

    http://www.tivoli.com/products/solutions/storage/c omplex_storage_net.html

    Give it a try... works great! The downloadable server code comes with 30-day demo licenses...

    1. Re:Use Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) by thempstead · · Score: 1

      yeah ...we've had good experience with TSM ... it can get complex though ... if you do decide to go that way you really need to do the courses so you can get the most out of it and to really understand what its doing (and to be able to DR it properly) ...

  5. I feel ya.. I do SAN. by Crypt0pimP · · Score: 1

    Drop me a line with any Questions folks, it's free from me.

    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..

    --
    Striving to achieve a lower state of conciousness
  6. Netvault from BakBone software is worth a look by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    BakBone do Netvault as a backup solution. I've used it for a year now, and found it to be excellent. We don't have a SAN here though, so I can't comment on how good the SAN stuff is, but you can fill in a form on their site to download a trial version.

    Lots of platforms supported, good performance, etc.

  7. the expensive solution by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Well, you could call your storageTek salesrep and ask about a sn6000. Would solve that problem, and several others which you may or may not have.

    I hesitate to say more because I work on the sn6000, so it is really a conflict of interest for me to mention it. (BUY BUY BUY, I have lots of STK stock)