Re: [gpfsug-discuss] Snapshots for backups

Wed, 09 May 2018 05:50:52 -0700

 
From my perspective the difference / benefits of using something like Protect and using backup policies over snapshot policies - even if its disk based rather than tape based,  is that with a backup you get far better control over your Disaster Recovery process. The policy integration with Scale and Protect is very comprehensive.  If the issue is Tape time for recovery - simply change from tape medium to a Disk storage pool as your repository for Protect, you get all the benefits of Spectrum Protect and the restore speeds of disk, (you might even - subject to type of data start to see some benefits of duplication and compression for your backups as you will be able to take advantage of Protect's dedupe and compression for the disk based storage pool, something that's not available on your tape environment.
 
If your looking for a way to further reduce your disk costs then potentially the benefits of Object Storage erasure coding might be worth looking at although for a 1 or 2 site scenario the overheads are pretty much the same if you use some variant of distributed raid or if you use erasure coding.
 
 
 
 
 
 
Andrew Beattie
Software Defined Storage  - IT Specialist
Phone: 614-2133-7927
 
 
----- Original message -----
From: "Fosburgh,Jonathan" <[email protected]>
Sent by: [email protected]
To: gpfsug main discussion list <[email protected]>
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Subject: Re: [gpfsug-discuss] Snapshots for backups
Date: Wed, May 9, 2018 10:28 PM
 

Our existing environments are using Scale+Protect with tape.  Management wants us to move away from tape where possible.

We do one filesystem per cluster.  So, there will be two new clusters.

We are still finalizing the sizing, but the expectation is both of them will be somewhere in the3-5PB range.

 

We understand that if we replicate corrupted data, the corruption will go with it.  But the same would be true for a backup (unless I am not quite following you).

 

The thought is that not using Protect and simply doing replication with snapshots will enable faster recovery from a catastrophic failure of the production environment, whereas with Protect we would have to restore petabytes of data.

 

FWIW, this is the same method we are using in our NAS (Isilon), but those utilities are designed for that type of use, and there is no equivalent to mmbackup.  Our largest Scale environment is 7+PB, and we can complete a backup of it in one night with mmbackup.  We abandoned tape backups on our NAS at around 600TB.

 

From: <[email protected]> on behalf of Andrew Beattie <[email protected]>
Reply-To: gpfsug main discussion list <[email protected]>
Date: Tuesday, May 8, 2018 at 4:38 PM
To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>
Cc: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [gpfsug-discuss] Snapshots for backups

 

 

First off a couple of questions:

 

1) your using Scale+Protect with Tape today?

2) your new filesystems will be within the same cluster ?

3) What capacity are the new filesystems

 

Based on the above then:

 

AFM-DR will give you the Replication that you are talking about -- please talk to your local IBM people about the limitations of AFM-DR to ensure it will work for your use case

Scale supports snapshots - but as mentioned snapshots are not a backup of your filesystem - if you snapshot corrupt data you will replicate that to the DR location

 

If you are going to spin up new infrastructure in a DR location have you considered looking at an object store and using your existing Protect environment to allow you to Protect environment to HSM out to a Disk basked object storage pool distributed over disparate geographic locations? (obviously capacity dependent)

 

Andrew Beattie

Software Defined Storage  - IT Specialist

Phone: 614-2133-7927

 

 

----- Original message -----
From: "Fosburgh,Jonathan" <[email protected]>
Sent by: [email protected]
To: gpfsug main discussion list <[email protected]>
Cc:
Subject: [gpfsug-discuss] Snapshots for backups
Date: Tue, May 8, 2018 11:43 PM
 

We are looking at standing up some new filesystems and management would like us to investigate alternative options to Scale+Protect.  In particular, they are interested in the following:

 

Replicate to a remote filesystem (I assume this is best done via AFM).

Take periodic (probably daily) snapshots at the remote site.

 

The thought here is that this gives us the ability to restore data more quickly than we could with tape and also gives us a DR system in the event of a failure at the primary site.  Does anyone have experience with this kind of setup?  I know this is a solution that will require a fair amount of scripting and some cron jobs, both of which will introduce a level of human error.  Are there any other gotchas we should be aware of?

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