Isilon Onefs 7.2 NDMP Backup and Restore

Each storage vendor (and NAS device) has its own, unique geometry and metadata for its filesystem.  These filesystem dependencies carry over into the format of the backup on tape.  These dependencies are also inherited by their NDMP backups and are independent of the NDMP protocol itself.

For example, NetBackup supports Isilon, VNX and Netapp,among others.  However, it does not support restoring VNX data to Isilon or Netapp.  Similarly, EMC Avamar supports those same NDMP platforms, but does not support restoring one NDMP backup to a different architecture.  This is because each vendor implements elements of the NDMP specification differently, to suit their individual filesystems.

Even though many vendors support NDMP backups (and even three-way backups between different vendors, as an example), their unique implementations add a layer of complexity.

Let us know if that helps!

Karl

If you want to be able to backup and restore independent of the underlying storage architecture, you can configure the backup application to backup using File Protocols, such as SMB and/or NFS.

Otherwise, as others have mentioned NDMP is a command and control protocol. It can make a series of calls against a variety of different storage platform to initiate a backup/restore using the native backup format of the underlying storage platform.

In short.  NDMP is a transport protocol, not a data format.

While every said before is totally correct, there are (limited) ways to extract data Isilon NDMP backups. If you are interested, and you can omit Windows permissions (ACLs), and need it for a one time job or a "plan C", let me know.

-- Peter

Pete I did not get that ? If we have a NDMP full from isilon , if we need to restore it to any Linux file system and keep the same shares ? how could we do that or can we ? This is for low cost DR situation ..

Guys if I am reading "EMC avamar NDMP accelerator for EMC NAS Systems" version 7.2 User Guide Rev 01 - PAGE 41 , it talks about "Restoring to a Linux or Windows Client from NDMP backups" ?

Can some one validate that for me please ..

Seems that Avamar, being an EMC product like Isilon, is able to correctly decode the Isilon backup streams sent over NDMP.

Which isn't too hard as Isilon uses an augmented tar format... which only theoretically gives you another way to extract stuff by yourself (I have tried and like the virtual node method more ).

-- Peter

So "Restoring to a Linux or Windows Client from NDMP backups"  from isilon NDMP is this a true statement ?

I would not make that statement in general.

I will leave that to the Avamar folks to determine if they do any translation of file formats.  It's tricky, especially when you have multi-protocol permissions.  How do you restore those properly to a system that doesn't understand how they are created?  The backup software will have to make some decisions about that.

It may be possible to extract stuff on your own.  But then you are responsible for what the data looks like (and especially what the metadata looks like) when you write it to a non-Isilon system.  If it doesn't work, I don't think there will be much support for that.

I admit I was surprised to see that Avamar supports this at all. Apparently it lets you choose either a Linux or a Windows target without mentioning issues arising from a mismatch, sigh.

Cheers

-- Peter