I need some advice on how to best set up my backups. I administer several small networks.
In networks where I have a NetApp, I back up only the NetApp through NDMP. The NetApp is attached with fibre to a fibre switch, and I have a large, 48-tape Overland or IBM tape library also attached by fibre to the fibre switch.
In networks where I have no NetApp or EMC storage, I back up the entire server (which acts as a domain controller, license server, backup server, etc.). In this case, the server and tape library are often directly attached through fibre with no switch.
So I currently am only used to backing up a single device (the server, or the NetApp). We are exanding a lot of our networks, and will be adding additional servers. So now I would like to back up all servers and any NetApp/EMC if present. At most, I am looking at something like 4 servers and a NetApp to be backed up.
So what would be some good ways to connect and back up everything? I have tested this out on one network, and backing up a single server over the LAN takes around 5 hours (and is onyl 50GB of data). That is way too long, considering that backing up the main server directly to tape over fibre takes only 1 hour. These servers are all on one tiny network, all in the same rack, all connected to a single network switch. I have tried using multiplexing and multiple data streams to utilize both of my 2 tape drives at once, and this seems to work ok, but still takes a long time.
What about disk staging? I could do this in areas where we also have a NetApp. Is it possible to back up a NetApp using NDMP, and also backup 3 servers to the same tape device? Do I need to add the tape library into NetApp twice? (Once for the NDMP connection, and once for a fibre connection to the backup server?)
