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Network Data Management Protocol

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by editor's response

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Tell us what you think about Dave Mays' column concerning the Network Data Management Protocol (NDMP), as featured in the March 5 Enterprise Storage Space e-newsletter. Does your organization use NDMP to control data backup of file servers that run on different platforms? Let us know if this information is useful to you.

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by que_gerard

I am System Administrator, I am using NDMP daily. To me, NDMP has several issues :
1) Restore by NDMP takes a lot of times as the tapes is read from the begining to the end. Example, a LTO tape contains around 120 GB of data, if you wish to restoreonly one file, the restore time is the same as the backup time, that means around 3 hours time.
2) NDMP is ok for a FULL backup but you wish to do an Incremental or Differential backup, you will go on a lot of troubles.
3) If you backup using NDMP, you have to restore by NDMP as well. That means in the case of a disaster, you can not restore your data simply through the LAN that means you should have a NAS permanently at your disposal in order to restore via NDMP.

by kulmacet

I think the issues you described have been answered in later versions of the NDMP and the Legato software. Currently we are using Legato 6.2 and this allows for single file restores to and from a NAS device in about 10 minutes. Our environment is a LTO library with dual drives and we do weekly full backups with daily incremental backups and have little or new issues, we are currently supporting about 6TB of data. You are correct in that you should have a NAS device available for a restore we have included this requirement in our DR plan should this become an issue. Overall we are satisfied with the Netapp NDMP and Legato software and we are anticipating the next release of Legato 7.0. for a Win2k environment.

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