Backup Solution for Solaris 2

[cnull]

I am looking for a good backup solution for a new system that we are purchasing in the neer future. It will be a Solaris v10. Currently we have Backup Exec on a Windows 2000 backing up all of our servers. We have a DELL PowerVault 136T Tape Library.
Has anyone tried BE agent for Solaris? Any problems? Can a simple Tar ball be done and sent to tape? Is that sufficient in normal situation?
I would like a good baremetal restore solution as well.
Any suggestion are appreciated.
Thank you!
CNULL

 

[daFranze]

Any sort of Backup Tool is good enough for an accidental deletion of files (user fault), restore of these files is easy and not time consuming (does not take a long time); if your task is "restore the 500 Gigs from /oracle", you will have a problem with nearly any type of Backup Tool, since their task is run the backups as efficient as possible, not run big restores as efficent as possible.

Backup Exec: I'm not sure if there is a Veritas Backup Exec for Solaris, but there is a Veritas NetBackup Agent for Solaris, which is ok.

Tarball to tape: a tarball is sufficient for normal situations and you can send it to a locally attached tapedrive or a remote drive using something like "tar cf - /directory | rsh remotehost dd if=- of=/dev/rmt/0cbn"
negative: somebody has to take care of the tapes, since tar does not speak to robots, so do not ufsdump, dd, ...

Baremetallrestore: it's quite easy to run this with a locally attached tapedrive and a backup written with OS utilities eg. ufsdump; you just boot your host from CD or net and run ufsrestore. As long as you don't have soft-RAIDs this is an easy job. If there are softraids you will first restore the OS on a single disk, setup the softraids and restore the data (ok, this is just one little more step)

Baremetallrestore with Backup Tools (non OS utilities): this scenario is more complex, since afaik most Tools do not offer this at all. You will need to install a OS on your host, a Tool Client and run a full restore, which is in most cases quite time consuming. If you have softraids there is again the same intermediate step: install OS, configure RAIDs, install Client, run restore...

The Scenario I prefere: I suggest to use a Backup Tool, such as Veritas NetBackup, Legato Networker, etc. to run daily backups of your data (you may include the OS)
To be prepared for a crash and a baremetallrestore I suggest to have a backup from the OS written by OS Tools (prefered to a locally attached drive - ok, there might be a SAN attached drive sth. -, which is available for a restore... ;-)); run this backup any time you run updates on your OS, so everything you loose in a crash is some logfiles...

Depending on how much time you have for restore and how many money you want to spend for your environment there are many scenarios: my prefered scenario has - in my eyes - a good balance between cost and efficiency...

Best Regards, Franz
--
Solaris System Manager from Munich, Germany
I used to work for Sun Microsystems Support (EMEA) for 5 years in the domain of the OS, Backup and Storage

 

[coffeysm]

I know there is Backupexec for Solaris, but I think it might suck we switched to Netbackup. I have to say that I love Netbackup!!! If you attach a plain old tape drive to the system you can use tar or ufsdump, but it will not be pretty by any means to restore. Especially if your not familiar with Unix. Like dafranze mentioned you will have to maintain the tapes yourself.

I would try the beagent though on Solaris, just to see how it works. We used Legato on one network and the Windows team was using BackupExec to backup some Unix machines for us. But I never dealt with Backupexec, and netbackup is pretty decent piece of software.