Hi
A quick overview on how we take NetApp backups, and why we ended up doing this way.
Initially our plan was to take backup of NetApp directly to Tape by utilizing the NetApp plugin and Replication Director. Backup was very slow so we ended up with a staging disk to speed up backups. The negative side of this is that Replication Director utilize SLP to operate, and SLP does not support a staging disk so we ended up excluding the Replication Director.
Later on we moved the backups to a MSDP pool. and the way we take backup of CIFS share today is by mounting the CIFS share to a Windows client, and setting up Windows\File policies on Master Server using the UNC path as selection to take backup of theese CIFS share.
Our Linux team has raised a concern that this method would require alot of time and manual steps in order to achieve similar for NFS shares mounted on a Linux server.
My question is as simple as follows:
Is there a way to take backup of NetApp volumes, without involving a client which have CIFS or NFS shares mounted? Would i be able to achieve this by implementing the Replication Director? My understanding is that NMDP is a way around that, but the problem is that it is very slow, and accelerator is only available on 7.7 version of Netbackup. Is there any other way?