Thanks for the quick response...

Actually I want to know the reason as well ...everyone knows about Isilon asking me the same question ...

I guess my customer has specific interest on NDMPCOPY ... as she could not find answer for it .

thanks !

Aya

I'll let others answer your specific question about ndmpcopy; however, just curious is there a reason you are not considering isi_vol_copy instead?

Hi

Thanks for the comment ,,, now it is clear and kind of understand the mechanism of the flow ...

I will let customer know what you saying and suggest for isi_vol_copy .

Thanks

aya

Thanks Andy for clarifying.  I was thinking the same, but only based on the fact that it isn't mentioned in the following document as a suggested tool:

http://www.emc.com/collateral/white-papers/h12212-smb-file-migration-emc-isilon-wp.pdf

Then again, just because it isn't mentioned doesn't mean it doesn't work so I held off on commenting.

Aya,

It might have been asked simply because it is a tool the client is already familiar with.  For instance, when faced with a choice between robocopy and emcopy for an SMB migration (assuming of course there isn't anything unique with emcopy they require) and the client will be performing the migration themselves, often they default to what they are already familiar with, namely robocopy.

While you are on the subject I was wondering if anybody has had any experience with the tools mentioned. In particular looking at performance comparisons between robocopy, EMCOPY and isi_vol_copy.

The main challenge in live environments where there is a small window of opportunity for the final cutover is the filesystem rescan to identify the final incremental changes can take longer than the acceptable cutover period. Which tool is best for the job?

Sent from my iPhone

hi chris !

Thanks for the update ... the Doc you mentioned is actually very clear and good one to introduced to! thanks Heaps!

thanks

Aya

AndrewChung wrote: Looking at how ndmpcopy works, I would say no, we do not support ndmpcopy.  This is a NetApp tool to move data between 2 filers.  It uses NDMP for both the source and target.  The Isilon would not be able to be an NDMP target nor would it be able to be an NDMP source for ndmpcopy.  NDMPCOPY runs directly on a vfiler just like isi_vol_copy runs on an Isilon node.  Unless the Isilon can look like a NetApp filer this wouldn't work.  Isi_vol_copy on the other hand, looks like a tape backup to the NetApp.  We just have special sauce to decode the NDMP stream and extract out the files and metadata.

NDMPCOPY works on Celerra/VNX as well, i don't think it's a proprietary Netapp tool.

How to use the ndmpcopy tool to copy file systems or directory structures

Ah ok.  I didn't do a thorough enough search.  I suspect this may work from Isilon to Isilon but not any cross vendor product.  The NDMP protocol does not specify how the data is transported and what the data format is, just the transport so unless ndmpcopy has some special sauce to do this translation it wouldn't work.  I would have to dig into ndmpcopy in depth to see if they offer this type of ability.

Works fine for me NetApp to Isilon NDMPcopy is no issue.

Ensure NDMPD is set up correctly on the NA side and enable NDMPD on the Isilon all should be good.

PAcmanSAN,

Are you leveraging NDMPcopy directly from a NetApp filer to Isilon? Or are you leveraging 'isi_vol_copy' from an Isilon node, which also uses NDMP?

isi_vol_copy from NetApp to Isilon was all we tried.

It was successful and efficient.

I thought we did straight NDMP trial as well turns out we didn't :-(