iSCSI SAN Backup

Discussion in 'Software' started by JohnBradbury, Dec 8, 2007.

  1. JohnBradbury

    JohnBradbury Kilobyte Poster

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    I've been playing around with my training lab and added a Windows 2003 iSCSI target. This is serving up storage blocks to the rest of my W2k3 servers.

    I'm wondering if there is a way to backup the drives on the SAN rather than each and every server?

    In disk management on the SAN the drives show up as off-line so it's not as simple as running my backup software but I can't find anything on the web.
     
  2. hbroomhall

    hbroomhall Petabyte Poster Gold Member

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    Depends on the SAN and your backup system I would have thought.

    In addition - if you did it on the SAN itself you would need to ensure somehow that the backup was consistant!

    I haven't actualy ever had my hands on a SAN - so don't have any practical experience of how that is done. :eek:

    Harry.
     
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  3. JohnBradbury

    JohnBradbury Kilobyte Poster

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    I'm using the MySAN iSCSI Target. From what I can see it only gives me the option to backup if I mount virtual hard drives as opposed to the raw block level disks.

    To be honest I'm not sure it can be done at this level but I know someone here might :D

    Also this might be a restriction of the target client I'm using but I can't spilt a physical disk into smaller blocks for mounting on remote servers.
     
  4. ffreeloader

    ffreeloader Terabyte Poster

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    Me neither, and it's one technology I'd really like to work with. A lot of jobs these days are asking for experience with it.
     
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  5. onoski

    onoski Terabyte Poster

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    At work we're in the process of implementing SAN and clustering so would have a better insight in the new year:)
     
    Certifications: MCSE: 2003, MCSA: 2003 Messaging, MCP, HNC BIT, ITIL Fdn V3, SDI Fdn, VCP 4 & VCP 5
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  6. Phoenix
    Honorary Member

    Phoenix 53656e696f7220 4d6f64

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    Most of the cheap and free OS based iSCSI targets don't have a lot of the intelligent features that some of the enterprise level SAN implementations have
    and being that they are in essence still reliant on the OS for disk i/o there are limitations on what they can do

    even most enterprise SANs will require some method of accessing the data presented to remote servers in order to back it up, most use the concept of snapshots to do this, as the snapshots are often treated as separate volumes, so they can be mounted on a different system

    Consistency is another big issue as harry points out, but this is only a problem from an application perspective, applications are what cause inconsistency's, a disk is a disk at the end of the day, what you put on it is on it, applications have a habit of pretending stuff is on it when its not actually there yet for performance reasons, this causes inconsistency if say, exchange thinks it's committed something, but its still floating around in memory not on disk

    I don't think MySAN has anything clever to enable backups
    you could try taking a VSS copy of the drive and storing it on a separate volume readable by the backup server, or perhaps play around with Data Protection Server 2k7, that has some nifty features as well
     
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  7. JohnBradbury

    JohnBradbury Kilobyte Poster

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    Cheers guys I'll keep playing but I think Ryan is right - the software I have is limited in it's functionality.
     

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