Good day, I’m guessing this question been asked a myriad of times, but we’re about to get serious with some of our Hadoop implementations so I wanted to re-ask to see if I’m missing anything, or if others happen to know if this might be on a future road map. For our current storage offerings (e.g. NAS or SAN), we give businesses the opportunity to choose 7, 14, or 45 day “backups” for their storage. The purpose of the backup isn’t so much as they are worried about losing their current data (we’re RAID’ed and have some stuff mirrored to remote datacenters), but more so if they were to delete some data today, they can recover from yesterday’s backup. Or the day before’s backup, or the day before that, etc. And to be honest, business units buy a good portion of their backups to make people feel better and fulfill custom contracts.
So far with HDFS we haven’t found too many formalized offerings for this specific feature. While I haven’t done a ton of research, the best solution I’ve found is an idea where we’d schedule a job to pull the data locally to a mount that is backed up via our traditional methods. See Michael Segel’s first post on this site http://lucene.472066.n3.nabble.com/Backing-up-HDFS-td1019184.html Though we’d have to work through the details of what this would look like for our support folks, it looks like something that could potentially fit into our current model. We’d basically need to allocate the same amount of SAN or NAS disk as we have for HDFS, then coordinate a snap on the the SAN or NAS via our traditional methods. Not sure what a restore would look like, other than we could give the end users read access to the NAS or SAN mounts so they can pick through what they need to recover and let them figure out how to get it back into HDFS. For use cases like ours where we’d need multi-day backups to fulfill business needs, is this kind of what people are thinking or doing? Moreover, are there any things in the Hadoop HDFS road map for providing, for lack of a better word, an “enterprise” backup/restore solution? Thanks in advance, Mac Noland – Thomson Reuters
