Local backup for FC & iSCSI volumes

Hi all,

we're preparing to buy a tape library that we might connect to the DSS. I had a closer look at the documentation and am a bit puzzled by the displayed configuration screens.

Can the DSS create and restore backups of file-based FC volumes all by itself?

The screen shot in the docs show that I first select the volume to back up and then shares on the volume. A FC volume doesn't have any shares....

Has anybody done any backups (and restores) of FC resources via the DSS' built-in backup functionality?

Regards
Jens

You can't do that, since Fibre Channel targets are file-system agnostic, so all they see is blocks of bytes. You could make up your own filesystem and store it on a FibreChannel target.

Also, Open-E doesn't do block-level backups, yet.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Robotbeat

You can't do that, since Fibre Channel targets are file-system agnostic, so all they see is blocks of bytes. You could make up your own filesystem and store it on a FibreChannel target.

Also, Open-E doesn't do block-level backups, yet.

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Thanks for the reply.

I indeed do believe that file-level FC/iSCSI "devices" could easily be backed up by the local client since, after all, they're files in the (DSS') local file system ;) . This would be similar to backing up "virtual disk" images on a VMware/Xen host.

But I have understood that this currently isn't implemented, so we'll have to go for backup solutions from inside the VMs residing on these FC targets.

Thanks again for your answer, it has helped me to see which way we'll have to go with our future backup concept.

Regards
Jens