I've just expanded our FAS2050A failover cluster with a SATA shelf in order to implement Disk 2 Disk backups via SnapMirror, SnapVault and OSSV, where one controller is owner of all internal SAS HDDs housing productive data und the other controller owning all SATA HDDs as backup destination
Prior to ordering the the new additional hardware I went throught a few online web trainings concerning ABCs and design principles of NetApp data protection solutions which gave me a fair understanding of possibilities how actually do Backup the NetApp way.
Now that everything is installed and I got into the details of all the components I'm seem to have gotten a bit lost. I intended to backup our SAN environment consisting of SnapManager for Hyper-V and dedicated LUNs managed by SnapDrive with the help of SnapVault controlled by Protection Manager where I would reduce the snapshot generations on the productive storage but rather keep a longer retention on the SATA storage.
Now, first of all it seems I misinterpreted SnapVault which doesn't transfer existing snapshots from primary to secondary but rather creates own snapshots on a separate schedule on both tears which when done from storage doesn't give you consistent data. There seems to be some interoperability between SnapDrive and Operations/Protection Manager via SnapManager products, but unfortunately not for SMHV. I can't even seem to find the right information regarding interoperability of SnapDrive alone centrally creating consistent snapshots of just LUNs. Although SnapDrive does detect an initialized SnapVault relationship and enables you to transfer an existing primary snapshot to secondary
Of course SMHV does support SnapMirror which indeed does replicate existing snapshots, but that route doesn't give me the possibility to keep different snapshot retentions on primary and secondary tier.
can somebody clarify or elaborate?
Kind regards
Lyndon
