Changes in DD when migrating to another backup solution

• If using DD Boost, from NMC you will have SU created with name of backup server under which list of folder will be created to represent devices. Nothing for you to do.
• If not using DD Boost, similar to above except that you will have to export shared path and then use it on storage nodes.

The only thing to keep in mind is that in NB you must leave data to expire and while devices are connected so that it can be removed from DD automatically.

Thanks Hrvoje for as usual spot on answer.

Could you suggest where should I look for more details..........still I am not 100% clear about the transition (though you helped me achieve 70 )

Regards

tech88kur

I'm afraid I have no clue where to look for more details - it is more about observations how the things are in my case.  As for defining things with NetWorker, there is admin guide and few integration guides with DD that contain useful information, but mostly from backup application point of view.

PatrickBetts - would you like to add something to this discussion, I have been waiting for your comments.

Thanks, tech88kur,

I appreciate your comment.  I like to stand in the background and let users like Hvoje Crvelin and Dynamox (and yourself) provide valuable input.  I would say that not much will change administratively, however, you may want to look at the integration guide to see how this change will work.

https://my.datadomain.com/custom-view/integration/Symantec_NBU_7%200_and_Later_Integration.pdf

Also, I'd be concerned about the existing Networker backups.  Will you be retaining them for certain period?  How do you plan on removing them to recover the space once you've moved over fully to Netbackup?

As for NW backups, I have burned myself there (not big thing, but...).  When I was migrating from NW7 to NW8 I decreased number of devices from 125 to 25   This is related to structural changes in NW8 and the way devices and streams are handled overall.  So, I just disabled devices and unmounted them from NW, but this at the same time will mark devices as expired, but it won't remove them from DD.  If I had left them with RO mode set I suspect it would be good.  Anyway, if you take such path, only after all save sets are expired on volumes, you can remove volume from DD.  To do so, I mounted data share and did rm -rf on device folder name.  Note that I have seen in some papers that you can do this properly now from NMC GUI too, but in version where I was using this 8.0.0.X this was not implemented.  I didn't really burned myself there since I have plenty of space on DD, but if you would do this on DD which is more than 50% used, you would fill it up.  I was a bit surprised when I got this myself, but there it goes... It seems as if those devices (and data) were somewhat locked from further usage and my DD usage pretty much doubled up.  However, truth to be told, I should have left those devices mounted and in RO mode and I would probably see no issue.

i guess the question is what are you going to do with data in Networker ? We are in a very similar predicament only we are migrating from TSM (that uses Data Domain via NFS) to Avamar /DD solution. We had to review our management classes and see when we expect data to expire, we do have some management classes that have 3 year retention. Obviously we don't want to keep TSM around for 3 years after we migrate to Avamar. It's going to be a policy decision and not a technical decision. But the goal is to get Avamar backing up to DD and slowly migrated clients from TSM to Avamar and watch TSM occupancy of DD go down. That's the plan as of now