[gpfsug-discuss] Snapshots for backups

Wed May 9 15:23:59 BST 2018

For DR, what about making your secondary site mostly an object store, use TCT to pre-migrate the data out and then use SOBAR to dump the catalogue. You then restore the SOBAR dump to the DR site and have pretty much instant most of your data available.

You could do the DR with tape/pre-migration as well, it’s just slower. OFC with SOBAR, you are just restoring the data that is being accessed or you target to migrate back in. Equally Protect can also backup/migrate to an object pool (note you can’t currently migrate in the Protect sense from a TSM object pool to a TSM disk/tape pool).

And put snapshots in at home for the instant “need to restore a file”. If this is appropriate depends on what you agree your RPO to be. Scale/Protect for us allows us to recover data N months after the user deleted the file and didn’t notice.

Simon

From: <gpfsug-discuss-bounces at spectrumscale.org> on behalf of "jfosburg at mdanderson.org" <jfosburg at mdanderson.org>
Reply-To: "gpfsug-discuss at spectrumscale.org" <gpfsug-discuss at spectrumscale.org>
Date: Wednesday, 9 May 2018 at 14:30
To: "gpfsug-discuss at spectrumscale.org" <gpfsug-discuss at spectrumscale.org>
Subject: Re: [gpfsug-discuss] Snapshots for backups

I agree with your points.

The thought here, is that if we had a complete loss of the primary site, we could bring up the secondary in relatively short order (hours or days instead of weeks or months).  Maybe this is true, and maybe this isn’t, though I do see (and have advocated for) a DR setup much like that.  My concern is that the use of snapshots as a substitute for traditional backups for a Scale environment is that that is an inappropriate use of the technology, particularly when we have a tool designed for that and that works.

Let me take a moment to reiterate something that may be getting lost.  The snapshots will be taken against the remote copy and recovered from there.  We will not be relying on the primary site for this function.

We were starting to look at ESS as a destination for these backups.  I have also considered that a multisite ICOS implementation might work to satisfy some of our general backup requirements.

From: <gpfsug-discuss-bounces at spectrumscale.org> on behalf of Andrew Beattie <abeattie at au1.ibm.com>
Reply-To: gpfsug main discussion list <gpfsug-discuss at spectrumscale.org>
Date: Wednesday, May 9, 2018 at 7:51 AM
To: "gpfsug-discuss at spectrumscale.org" <gpfsug-discuss at spectrumscale.org>
Cc: "gpfsug-discuss at spectrumscale.org" <gpfsug-discuss at spectrumscale.org>
Subject: Re: [gpfsug-discuss] Snapshots for backups

From my perspective the difference / benefits of using something like Protect and using backup policies over snapshot policies - even if its disk based rather than tape based,  is that with a backup you get far better control over your Disaster Recovery process. The policy integration with Scale and Protect is very comprehensive.  If the issue is Tape time for recovery - simply change from tape medium to a Disk storage pool as your repository for Protect, you get all the benefits of Spectrum Protect and the restore speeds of disk, (you might even - subject to type of data start to see some benefits of duplication and compression for your backups as you will be able to take advantage of Protect's dedupe and compression for the disk based storage pool, something that's not available on your tape environment.

If your looking for a way to further reduce your disk costs then potentially the benefits of Object Storage erasure coding might be worth looking at although for a 1 or 2 site scenario the overheads are pretty much the same if you use some variant of distributed raid or if you use erasure coding.

Andrew Beattie
Software Defined Storage  - IT Specialist
Phone: 614-2133-7927
E-mail: abeattie at au1.ibm.com<mailto:abeattie at au1.ibm.com>

----- Original message -----
From: "Fosburgh,Jonathan" <jfosburg at mdanderson.org>
Sent by: gpfsug-discuss-bounces at spectrumscale.org
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Subject: Re: [gpfsug-discuss] Snapshots for backups
Date: Wed, May 9, 2018 10:28 PM

Our existing environments are using Scale+Protect with tape.  Management wants us to move away from tape where possible.

We do one filesystem per cluster.  So, there will be two new clusters.

We are still finalizing the sizing, but the expectation is both of them will be somewhere in the3-5PB range.

We understand that if we replicate corrupted data, the corruption will go with it.  But the same would be true for a backup (unless I am not quite following you).

The thought is that not using Protect and simply doing replication with snapshots will enable faster recovery from a catastrophic failure of the production environment, whereas with Protect we would have to restore petabytes of data.

FWIW, this is the same method we are using in our NAS (Isilon), but those utilities are designed for that type of use, and there is no equivalent to mmbackup.  Our largest Scale environment is 7+PB, and we can complete a backup of it in one night with mmbackup.  We abandoned tape backups on our NAS at around 600TB.

From: <gpfsug-discuss-bounces at spectrumscale.org> on behalf of Andrew Beattie <abeattie at au1.ibm.com>
Reply-To: gpfsug main discussion list <gpfsug-discuss at spectrumscale.org>
Date: Tuesday, May 8, 2018 at 4:38 PM
To: "gpfsug-discuss at spectrumscale.org" <gpfsug-discuss at spectrumscale.org>
Cc: "gpfsug-discuss at spectrumscale.org" <gpfsug-discuss at spectrumscale.org>
Subject: Re: [gpfsug-discuss] Snapshots for backups

Hi Jonathan,

First off a couple of questions:

1) your using Scale+Protect with Tape today?

2) your new filesystems will be within the same cluster ?

3) What capacity are the new filesystems

Based on the above then:

AFM-DR will give you the Replication that you are talking about -- please talk to your local IBM people about the limitations of AFM-DR to ensure it will work for your use case

Scale supports snapshots - but as mentioned snapshots are not a backup of your filesystem - if you snapshot corrupt data you will replicate that to the DR location

If you are going to spin up new infrastructure in a DR location have you considered looking at an object store and using your existing Protect environment to allow you to Protect environment to HSM out to a Disk basked object storage pool distributed over disparate geographic locations? (obviously capacity dependent)

Andrew Beattie

Software Defined Storage  - IT Specialist

Phone: 614-2133-7927

E-mail: abeattie at au1.ibm.com<mailto:abeattie at au1.ibm.com>

----- Original message -----
From: "Fosburgh,Jonathan" <jfosburg at mdanderson.org>
Sent by: gpfsug-discuss-bounces at spectrumscale.org
To: gpfsug main discussion list <gpfsug-discuss at spectrumscale.org>
Cc:
Subject: [gpfsug-discuss] Snapshots for backups
Date: Tue, May 8, 2018 11:43 PM

We are looking at standing up some new filesystems and management would like us to investigate alternative options to Scale+Protect.  In particular, they are interested in the following:

Replicate to a remote filesystem (I assume this is best done via AFM).

Take periodic (probably daily) snapshots at the remote site.

The thought here is that this gives us the ability to restore data more quickly than we could with tape and also gives us a DR system in the event of a failure at the primary site.  Does anyone have experience with this kind of setup?  I know this is a solution that will require a fair amount of scripting and some cron jobs, both of which will introduce a level of human error.  Are there any other gotchas we should be aware of?

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