NDMP Restores elsewhere?

The backup accelerator cannot be used with virtual (demo/simulator) Isilon and IsilonSD ("Edge") nodes,

but you should be able to set up a three-way NDMP solution using the regular network, provided that

your Netvault server has FC access to the tape drives by itself.

The capacity of your virtual or SD nodes might be too small for usefull restores.

You can experiment with remote-mounting another, larger NFS server

to one node (under /ifs/somepath) and redirecting the restores there.

So the Isilon node will act as NFS client, which -- beware -- was never supported,

and afaik is technically prohibited in newer OneFS releases. Last time I tried it out

successfully that was under some OneFS 7.x ...

Also note that with this NFS hook, no Windows ACLs will be restored.

Another way to restore the tapes is by reading the raw 'backup images' from tape,

these images use some customized version of the 'tar' format after all. I have

successfully extracted directories and files using GNU tar (under Linux)

from Isilon NDMP images; the extraction skipped some extra information

such as -- you might guess it -- Windows ACLs, as well as Isilon specific metadata,

but the basic stuff was there.

hth

-- Peter

The underlying problem is that NDMP, while yes it's a standard is dependent upon the underlying source filesystem for what it backs up.  You can't for-instance backup a VNX and restore it to a NetApp, or a NetApp to an Isilon, and so-forth.  As Peter mentioned there are ways of pulling the data out, and there are third-party companies that can help you pull the ACLs too, or pull data off a ton of old tapes and get rid of them, however you then need something really big, deep, and cheap to store all that data in, like a giant object store ECS/Glacier/etc.

I can connect you with one of the tape restoration companies if you'd like that specializes in this, just drop me a note. (if you're trying to just make the tape or VTL problem go away)

Chris Klosterman

Principal SE, Datadobi

chris.klosterman@datadobi.com

Thanks so much Peter!  Very helpful.  We'll give those couple of options a go and report back whether this still works in OneFS 8.xx

Chris - Thank you, I'll send you an email. 

You specifically asked if there are service providers that work with NDMP tape backups. Datarecovery.com provides these services. The tapes are extracted to images, and we customize software to carve out the backups. It can be a lot of work, so the cost is about $2500 per tape.