Backup Tape Restore – NetBackup

Data Strategies Interchange today reported on the completion NetBackup Backup Tape Restore project.

The customer, a major animation studio, was using NetBackup for data protection and data archival for their NetApp and EMC Isilon NAS storage systems. In order to be prepared for future disaster recovery, a set of test backup tapes was selected for restoral in a scenario where NetApp or Isilon filers would not be available as restore targets.

This highlights a particular issue with NDMP backups, in the sense that while the NDMP protocol assures the interoperability between the backup software and NAS Filers of various makes, the format of the filer-generated backup stream is not part of the standard and is generally incompatible between different manufacturers.

Data Strategies was provided with the client’s LTO-4 backup tapes and, using its proprietary MediaGenie Proteus application, generated a session-level catalog so that the NDMP backup sessions could be identified. In the next phase of the NetBackup Backup Tape Restore project, again using Proteus, fragment files where extracted from tape and passed to a corresponding utility program that restored the corresponding file systems to disk.

All data was delivered on the customer on high capacity SATA disks with a file system as determined by the original backup source selection.

Further information about DSI’s backup data migration services can be found here.