Where to connect a FC tape library

[mheimberg]

Hi

As I am not so much experienced with backup technologies I would like to know some more opinions about the following:

With a certain backup software it is possible to connect a FC tape library directly to the NetApp.

This is the preferred way - I thought.

A colleague of mine now stated, that "every backup solution on FiberChanel have to be placed on a fiberchannel switch."

As reason there were two points: "Heavy performance impact and double point of failure in case of crash of netapp system" - the latter means: if the NetApp systems has a problem, I am not able to do any restore.

What do others think, what experiences have you made?

Thanks for your contribution

Markus

[raja_sekaran]

Hi Markus,

It depends how is existing the setup.

If you want to take only the filer data then you can directly connect to filer and configure the NDMP backup.It will be quiet faster.

if you have many filer as well as servers need to take backup ,connect to SAN switch configure in the backup server .Individual drives or library connection to filer will waste the resource.

Thanks

Raja

[BrendonHiggins]

We have a two drive library connected via SCSI to the filer and use NDMP to backup the CIFS volumes. This could be done via FC by just changing the cable, etc... We use HP data protector to managed the NDMP jobs. I recommend you use another application which can 'restart' failed NDMP jobs. Nothing worse than having to restart from tape 1 on a 4Tb volume just because it timed out waiting for media!!!!

We also use FC to connect a 2nd 2 drive library to a Windows server. We then mount snaps as vclones and back up the LUNs if they are local drives.

Both methods get about the same level of throughput.

[cebulrdcis]

I have also same concern, regarding configuring NDMP drive in filer using FC Tape drives,

we have FAS3020 and Neo Overland 4200 with 4 x LTO4 Native FC drives and we are using MCData 4500 FC SAN Switch, we want to connect the four drives to FAS3020 as NDMP drive. Neo Overland robot were already configured in our Netbackup media server ( we have a separate FC SAN switch MCData 4700 zone with media server and the neo overland robot).

My problem now is my filer cannot see the tape drives. I used port 0d in my filer as initiator and make a zone in McData 4500 with the four drive and NetApp as member of the zone. I also enabled OSMS in MCdata, aslo neo overland 4200 drive config topology were set to force point to point as speciified in

https://now.netapp.com/Knowledgebase/solutionarea.asp?id=kb23046

to but still no tape present on the system.

I also tried to configure the port as target port (as specified in

http://now.netapp.com/NOW/knowledge/docs/ontap/rel707_vs/html/ontap/bsagfcp/c6mgt-f3.htm

Ive also checked the following documents

http://www.netapp.com/us/technology/osn/mcdata.html

but still with no luck my filer cannot see the tape drive.

What else do I need to configure?