isi_vol_copy_vnx - VMAX

Haynesj,

isi_vol_copy_vnx is written against the DART, now-called VNXOE for File CodeBase, so whether the back-end is a Clariion, an integrated VNX, or a VMAX is irrelevant for it's functionality.  My only suggestion in this space is to look at the average size of your files on the source gateway.  For instance compare server_df ALL and server_df ALL -i, do some math per filesystem then to get an average file size.  For filesystems with average file sizes below 15-20KB, the NDMP control traffic used by isi_vol_copy_vnx may actually consume more bandwidth than the data itself.  In that regard rsync may be more efficient.  The other thing to look at is if you are using VNX/Celerra deduplication and compression today.  If you are, you'll need to change a setting, per filesystem, so that the NDMP stream expands the data in flight, rather than trying to copy over the compressed data.

You'll want to change the backup data threshold from 90 to 0, which signals the datamover, to send uncompressed and undeduped data to the backup media.  It expands in RAM, not on disk, so no worries about consuming excess capacity in the filesystem.  The only risk here is that if you are doing regular NDMP backups today, they will probably get larger.  Also Celerra's & VNX's by default only permit up to 4 NDMP streams at once per datamover, so if you are running 4 isi_vol_copy_vnx jobs against a single datamover, you may not be able to run regular backups until they complete.  This value has been expandable with a simple param change up to 8 for years, but the default last time I checked was still 4.

Rsync would do the same thing, only it would basically be acting as an NFS client, so no changes are needed.  In either case you are doing a data migration without any hosts in the middle, you can run rsync directly from the Isilon nodes, and if you need to increase concurrency, you can spread the migration across multiple rsync jobs on multiple Isilon nodes.

Hope this helps,

~Chris Klosterman

Senior Solution Architect

EMC Isilon Offer & Enablement Team

email: chris.klosterman@emc.com

twitter: @croaking