What to do with SAN

[John_1026]

I have purchases a MSA 1000 and some drive cages and setup a logical drive for 5 servers.

I have also got two Msl5000 tape librarys.

I am using Arcserve to back up the servers over night.

The Servers have the own raid storage and the San was purchased for quick recovery of data.

This is the problem.

My first thoughs was to use Touble Take and run a syc every 3 hours. Which I have working but I feel its a bit of a bodge.

My second thought was ether to use arcserve to back up to file or Windows back up to do the same. Windows back up will not do SQL and Arcserve just as windows backup just produces a back up file. This method could be a problem due to possible file courruption and time taken to restore. I like just to be able to copy a file back if needed.

Help, what method would you use

Clustering mabe?

Cheers in advance.

[Uwe Zessin]

Double Take is a fine product for replication to a different location and for delayed change shipping, but it doesn't look like you have a second location.

It sounds like you are after fast recovery if a user has deleted a file. For Windows 2003 you could look at the Windows-supplied VSS.

For Windows 2000 you might want to look at a product called 'Virtual Replicator'. It's a host-based virtualization that allows online-growth of virtual disks and snapshots.
http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/sanworks/vr/index.html

MSA1000 used to come with a single server demo license, but I haven't checked in a while if that is still true.

MS SQL Server is not so easy, because you have a logical dependency between its files. I'm not familiar with SQL, but you might be able to ship its journals to another server and optionally replay them on a standby database.

[John_1026]

Cheers

The Double Take is mainly used for hardware failure as each machine has a sister machine.

The problem is if a delete or DB corruption accurs on master it replicated to target in seconds.

I wrote a script to fire of a repset on Double Take every 3 hours but it kills the server as a full mirror goes on.

I want to be able

a: say if sql db failed I can just copy the logs and database back and restart SQL.


b:Simple file restore.


The Windows 2003 shadow copy is not great as I have had problems with it.

[andy steven]

hi

have you considered a virtual tape libary VTL , HP have just brought one out and i know ADIC do one, they are normaly SATA disk arrays but they appear as a tape libary to your backup software. So you backup to the VTL first and then that writes to the tape.

backups and restores are about 50% faster than LTO2

http://h18006.www1.hp.com/products/storageworks/6000vls/index.html

http://www.adic.com/ibeCCtpSctDspRte.jsp?section=10040

[John_1026]

Cheers I will have a look,

Having just spent 50k on the SAN I would like to use it

That second link looks interesting


cheers

[Adam Garsha]

You could also look at data protector and backing up to disk.

For databases, you can look at SQL agents that your backup software provider provides or you could cobble together your own custom method if you know MS SQL administration well enough.

Bottom line is that you need a copy of the data (with the database quiesced/buffers-flushed or you need a database driven backup to get the data) and you need the journal/log files to be able to bring that copy of data up to current.

[Hense, Klaus]

Hallo,
a fine Product for desaster recovery on SQL or Oracle Database is "Libelle".
See http://www.libelle.com for more information.

[John_1026]

Cheers chaps I will have a look into it.

I have been thinking of useing SQl database dumps onto the San and using a flat file copy until to copy the other files

[Jason Cobb]

We are using a Proliant Storage Server G4 DL380 with External SATA as a dump device for native SQL dumps. Weekly fulls, and nightly incrementals. Then we run a backup agent on the dump files (as regular files) on this NAS box to get it to tape. We were using a SQL agent from our backup vendor (tivoli) but realized that it doesn't check database consistency when it backs up. I am not the DBA, but I understand that the native sql dumps indicate if there is a problem with the database. We leave a weeks worth on the NAS, and colocate the tape.

I have also had good results with Arcserv's backup to disk feature. You can setup the arcserve server to use a folder on the disk to be the backup device. My theory was that then you could use a script to back that up to tape. I never got around to writing the script. But it backs up and restores from disk just fine. Good luck.