BakBone TechTips
Backing up Data ONTAP GX nodes is very much like any other NAS device. However, because of the clustering technology, more forethought and planning are needed to optimize backup and restore operations. The complexity of a global namespace and the abstraction of FlexVol volumes are transparent to users. However, this complexity is not transparent to NDMP backups in Data ONTAP GX.
There are a number of additional considerations to take into account for a successful backup solution.
Backups Using NDMP Only
Data ONTAP GX nodes do not support native tape dump and restore, these operations must be done using NDMP. Data ONTAP GX nodes have NDMP built in, so since NetVault Backup supports NDMP it will work with Data ONTAP GX. That said, only DMA software qualified for NetApp is supported through NetApp Global Services.
Node Affinity of NDMP Backups
Data ONTAP GX backups have node affinity rather than cluster affinity. This means a backup of a FlexVol volume can be done only at the Data ONTAP GX node which has that FlexVol volume resides. For striped volumes, this can be thought of as the node currently holding the metadata member volume. From the view of a client, the data can reside anywhere in the cluster, and the node to which that client connects routes the request to the node that currently owns that data. That’s not the case for NDMP backup. Because of this affinity, a backup run against one node in a cluster can only back up the FlexVol volumes that are on that node. The other FlexVol volumes distributed throughout the cluster, living on other Data ONTAP GX nodes, must be backed up using an NDMP backup of the corresponding nodes.
Backups and FlexVol Junctions
FlexVol volumes are rarely simply arranged in a flat hierarchy below the root FlexVol volume. Typically, FlexVol volumes are joined to other FlexVol volumes using special “junctions� to form a global tree hierarchy
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