Backing up a RM Snapshot

Question

Good morning all,

Site Information:

RM 5.1.3
CLARiiON CX4-480

I was wondering if anyone had any experience with the following:

I am taking a snapshot of a rather large LUN off of the CLARiiON and then mounting it to a "Dedicated" backup host. However because of how traditional backup software works (in this case we are using CommVault) it always sees that the snapshot LUN that is mounted as a "Full" because it sit's within a directory.

Basically my problem is everytime the snapshot gets mounted (because it gets mounted to M:\rm_mounts\T Drive) as a directory under a drive it wants to a do a full backup. Is there ANY way around this? Can RM snapshots not be mounted a straight drive or would that not matter because it would still see the archive bit as flipping?

Any help on this issue would be great. Oh yeah BTW it's a 10TB LUN

AranH1 · Answer

I don't think the issue is with the mount process or location. It does not matter if you use a folder mountpoint or a drive letter to mount the LUN. The data will appear the same to the mount host.

You are taking a snapshot of a production LUN, and to the mount host that LUN is the full 10TB volume from another host. I think that since the mount host is not the host that owns the LUN, it will not be able to set the correct archive bits to perform incremental or differential backups.

I use snaps of clones to backup some of our production SQL servers and we run full backups every day off of the snapshots. But since this is a snap of a clone it does not matter since there is no impact to production. The backup can take as long as it needs to.

A 10TB LUN is a different challenge though. Have you looked at using a dedupe backup target instead? We also have DataDomain DeDupe backup arrays and use CommVault to backup directly from production (or snap of clone) to DataDomain disk arrays and get great compression. You could do something similar.

csmykay1 · Answer

Yeah, that is what we have figured. Basically we are going to have to do a weekly full of the data (Which takes over a day and a half) of one snapshot on a different configured job on a different schedule like SAT. And then a different job and schedule to start up snapshots on Monday once a day every day after for "Quick" recovery.

Thanks for the reply thought.

AranH1 · Answer

What kind of data is on the 10TB LUN?If there is not a large amount of change rate in the data I would look into dedupe solutions that will allow you to backup from production with little impact to production. Have you looked at dedupe products?

Replication Manager

Backing up a RM Snapshot

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