Adam> Hey all. Does anyone have any experience with Acopia? I've got Adam> brief and unpleasant knowledge of Rainfinity, but I've never Adam> worked with Acopia, and I hear it's good stuff for NAS namespace Adam> virtualization, so I'm curious about any success stories or Adam> failure stories you might have.
We got one at my current work, but we've moved away from it completely. The big big big silent issue with it (or any NAS redirector like this) is backups. Specifically, restores. Unless your backup software and your NAS box talk very well together, you're going to be hosed on restores. Now, I will admit this was all a couple of years ago, and it may have been fixed or improved since then, but think of this situation and ask Acopia how it is handled. Their answer will be illuminating (and I'd love to hear it if you'll share it!). Have two Netapp filers, one which is a fast FAS3xxx, the other a nice big Nearstore with bigger but slower disks. Call them F and S. So you keep tier one data on F, and tier 2 data on S, with say with 3Tb on F and 16Tb on S. Now you do a backup. How? NDMP? How do you syncronize F & S to have a completely consistent view into the total pool of files? Now, assume that F dies and needs to be restored completely. How do you do this? Efficiently and quickly and without having files appear on two places? 1. You can backup through the Acopia, giving you a single image to backup, but you a) hit the acopia hard and b) have to restore through it, and c) how do you relayout your files into S & F properly? Again, they may have good answers to this question. 2. You can backup behind the Acopia's back, using NDMP (or whatever you want) so that you get the speed and use of snapshots for consistent backups. But now you need to restore data, and some of it's moved from one system to another? How do you *find* the data to restore? And if it's split across both F & S systems, you now need to manually recover it. 3. How many files will you have? Both Rainfinity and Acopia blew up for us because we had millions of small files. The Rainfinity was before my time at $WORK, but the Acopia also ran into problems with 8+ million files. I suspect that this is fixed now... but I wonder. It's a great idea, but the downsides (at the time) turned out to be just too much. My opinion these days is that an HSM system which is part of the backup system is the way to go, because it integrates two critical data management tools together, so they work (hopefully!) together. CommVault is pretty good in this respect with Netapps and their HSM module. Not perfect, but not bad either. Good luck, and let us know how it works out. John _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lopsa.org http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
