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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?"

4 of 15 comments (clear)

  1. 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 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.

  2. 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...