How to Backup NetApp NAS

Thank you Ian!

Is the NDMP appliance an easy set up? It has to be physical in our non-VM building.

My pleasure!

Setup is reasonably straightforward but I think the procedure might be restricted to employees and partners. Your account team should be able to tell you for sure.

you have use NDMP accelerator for NAS backup in avamar.

for more about NDMP configuration, please go through below link

https://www.emc.com/collateral/software/white-papers/h8235-avamar-nas-ndmp-wp.pdf

You shouldn't need a back-end capacity license for an accelerator node since it doesn't store any data itself.

The options you were sent are all storage nodes. None of these are the node type you need. The node type you're looking for is "Avamar Gen4S Accelerator Node" or "Avamar Gen4T Accelerator Node".

How do I determine the Back End Capacity License for Avamar Data Store (TB)? Is this via command mccli server show-prop? If so I'm showing Total Capacity 3.9 TB.

When requesting a quote for the NDMP Accelerator Node, I was also asked which node type I'm looking for.

I'm not sure but they did send several options (can you provide any guidance here?):

M600 (2.0 TB licensed capacity) l Six 3.5” hard drives l Dual 750W power supplies l Eight 10/100/1000baseT GbE ports l RMM4 management port

M1200 (3.9 TB licensed capacity) l Six 3.5” hard drives l Dual 750W power supplies l Eight 10/100/1000baseT GbE ports l RMM4 management port

M2400 (7.8 TB licensed capacity) l Twelve 3.5” hard drives l One 2.5” SSD drive (internal mounting) l Dual 750W power supplies l Eight 10/100/1000baseT GbE ports l RMM4 management port

Thank you Ian, you are always most helpful. I have one more thing to bother you with if I may.

In this new datacenter with our NetApp FAS2650 and Accelerator Node which will connect back to our Avamar and DD in our other Datacenter (states away) for backups, we will also have about 5 physical servers that would need to be backed up. I'm assuming in order to back up these physical servers in this new datacenter we will require an Avamar Node there as well, to connect over the WAN and store those backups on our main DD. Is that correct? This new datacenter will be all physical, nothing virtual.

Happy to help!

With regard to backing up over a WAN, I don't think there would be a lot of benefit to having an Avamar node on-site if the backups are going to the DD across the WAN anyway. Data Domain is much more sensitive to WAN latency than Avamar and the amount of data being sent to the Avamar will be several orders of magnitude less than the amount of data being sent to the DD.

If it's a sizable remote site with a high latency WAN connection back to the main site, backing up to a small on-site Avamar and DD and replicating to the main site may significantly improve performance but if the number and size of systems at the remote site is low, it may not be worth the investment.

Correction: I stated WAN however it will be a dedicated Comcast Metro-e EPL line 50up/5Odown connection.
In this case, is it still best to just install the client plug-ins on the physical servers at our new datacenter in order to back up with our main datacenter that houses the Avamar/DD (across the dedicated line)? this new datacenter housing 5-6 physical servers and NetAPP/Accelerator node will be local to us whereas our main center is a state away (50 miles) that houses our Avamar/DD.
Likewise, you can't just get an Avamar node to help with backups there at the new datacenter as you're saying we'd need a DD as well? and there is no point as there would not be any significant improvement in performance/latency/etc?

The latency matters more than the bandwidth as DD is very sensitive to latency. I think it couldn't hurt to try backing the clients up directly to the remote Avamar / DD as long as the link meets the latency requirements from the Avamar / DD integration guide (see pages 28-29):

https://support.emc.com/docu69622_Avamar-7.3-and-Data-Domain-System-Integration-Guide.pdf?language=en_US

Putting just an Avamar node in place probably wouldn't be of much benefit. When we're talking about Avamar / DD, the Avamar side of things should be fast enough even if the Avamar is on the WAN because the Avamar side handles so much less data.

Having a local Av/DD is a good option if the client systems are large or numerous and the remote link has high latency. Backups to a local system would run more quickly and replication is generally more efficient than WAN backup. Of course that comes at a (literal) cost so it's a question of cost / benefit. It really depends on how much data you need to move.

Thank you Ian, you are always very knowledgeable, helpful and quick to reply. I very much appreciate that! Have a great weekend!

I have experience backing up data over WAN with and without data domains. There are a lot of things that can impact performance many of them already mentioned.  In general Avamar with or without data domain will more more effective over the WAN than other backup solutions.  One thing I haven't seen mentioned yet for consideration is restore speeds.  With Avamar oftentimes in a night you can backup several TB of data over 50 mbps WAN connection but restoring all the data will take significantly longer than backup times.  Restoring 1 TB at 50 mbps will take about 2 days.  There is an option to add compression during restore which would help but it will pretty much always take longer than a local restore.

If a large amount of data needs to be restored it might save time to restore to a different client at the primary data center and transport a portable device between sites.  There are little details that could possibly end up being a big deal though.  Like you can't really do that with a DB restore, Windows BMR or you might loose NDMP ACLs.

Ryan, thank you! Restore times is a very important point to note. We shouldn't have that amount of data (1TB) to restore at one time, it should generally only be at most 40-50gb I would think so that should help. I like your idea about using a portable device to restore a lot of data if that ever occurs. That would make the best sense in my situation as our 2 datacenters are not that far apart, just a drive across a bridge.

Hi Ian

I have installed Avamar AVE in my network and also go myself a Backup Accelerator node to backup from my VNXe 3200 and Unity 300. But the Backup Accelerator doesnt seem to be able to establish a connection with the NAS when I put in the username 'ndmp' and the password for it.

Is is necessary for the backup accelerator to ping to the hostname of the nas (and not only ping to the IP)?