restoring NetApp NDMP backups, FAS3210A needed?

[KEVIN_CADE]

We have a few configurations that backed up our old NetApp ONTAP cluster data:

1) NetApp volumes backed up via NDMP to a tape library 

2) SnapMgr for Exchange VM backups to Netapp volumes/snapshots

3) SnapMgr for SQL VM backups to NetApp volumes/snapshots

4) SMVI VMware VM backups to NetApp storage volumes/snapshots

We are decomissioning these old systems but are evaluating the cost of offering restores of backups on this config.

We've moved our active data to a new non-NetApp SAN so these old FAS3210A can be decomissioned, but I need to find out if we can do restores to something other than NetApp hardware.

The load would be minimal but the size of voumes could be anything from a hundred GBytes to 7 Tb.

I've read about NDMP volume backups (option 1 above) and believe we cannot just connect our tape library with these backups to a new Linux or Windows machine and do generic NDMP restores to get the data out of the volume.  See this info here.  I don't think the NetApp simulator would work for our larger luns either.

I know less about option 2 and 3 configuration.  We have the NetApp SMExch/SMSQL software installed on our old VMs that run on the old NetApp SAN, but can re recongure these to restore their data from a different location?  I know these backups all live on as snapshots on a volume on our NetApp SAN, and wouldn't know how to unpick and change and reconfigure it to different storage.  Obviousl it needs to be ONTAP since their snapshots are so cruicial to the config.

Any suggestions or insights would be appreciated.

cheers

KC

[aborzenkov]

NetApp dump stream should be compatible with ufsdump/ufsrestore; at least in the past people reported success with reading them on Solaris. You probably lose ACLs etc but file content should be accessible.

[Darkstar]

If it's only filedata that you're interested in, then yes, a simple ufsrestore from Solaris should still work (it definitely did work with NDMP dumps from OnTap 7.3.x). BUT you will most certainly lose all non-UNIX permissions (NFSv4 ACLs, CIFS ACLs, etc.) and, for LUNs, you will lose all metadata and only get the (raw) LUN file. Getting data back from a LUN will be a bit difficult but should be possible if you're not afraid of using hex-editors and loop-mounts under Linux 😉

But if you were using SnapMirror to Tape (SM2T) to dump whole volumes, then a NetApp filer will be your only hope of ever recovering data from it (if you don't want to pay Kroll OnTrack for a recovery 😉 However, you can restore these volumes onto any model of NetApp filer that runs at least the same OnTap version as the filer from which the dump was taken, and which supports at least the same sizes for volumes etc. (so no restoring a 20TB volume onto an old FAS2020 but that should be obvious... )