HPE Storage Users Group

Hi every one,

I am newbie with the HP 3PAR and I want and advise, I want to do a backup of a couple of Virtual Volumes and I think It could be done with Virtual Copy.

I need to program a task to do a Virtual Copy of a couple of Virtual Volumes and export them to a new server for the backup, this task need to be done every day at midnight.

What is the best way to do this?

Thanks.

What is your backup software? Reason I ask is that some (Netbackup?) has some integration with 3PAR to pull this off. Another user on these forums, HDTVguy, only uses snapshots (virtual copy) and remote copy to do all his backups with out a 3rd party backup app.

I am using HP Data Protector, I think it could be virtual copies but how could I automate this?

This is what I want to do.

1.- removevlun - remove the virtual copy I have exported to the backup server
2.- updatevv - update the virtual copy after unexport
3.- createvlun - export the virtual copy to the backup server

I was looking for schedule this tasks but when I read the documentation of createsched command I noticed that just the updatevv command can be scheduler.

How can I schedule this tasks?

Thanks.

I am not familiar with HP Data Protector yet... but I would like to. Have you seen this document? I suspect it outlines explains exactly what you want to do:

http://h20566.www2.hp.com/portal/site/h ... cachetoken

I do not know Data Protector, but does it have a the ability to integrate with arrays and trigger snapshots? I know Commvault can do this, it can quiesce an OS then snap the lun and present it to a backup host where it then runs the backup against the snap shot. I will say we tried that approach, but it had some quirks to it. Since I am about 99% virtualized and have a large VM installation, I have scripts that enumerate datastores, snap VMs then snap the array volume with an expiration time. Since we replicate everything to the other data center on the DR side I just snap all those volumes once a day.

6pm Snap all volumes in DR data center array with expiration

7pm through 5am go a cluster at a time and enumerate datastores and snap VMs then array volume with an 14 day expiration

8pm-6am after the previous script runs we run another script a few hours later that triggers the remote copy of those volumes.

This allows us to to get clean VM snap backups. Since we schedule when all the remote copies run we know they are all done before 6pm the following day so before we kick this process off we snap all the volumes on the target array. The down side is the target array snap recovery is 24 hours behind, but this process is for backup only. For our mission critical systems they replicate far more frequently and it is just the backup snap that we retain for 2 weeks. For 85% of my VMs I am out of the traditional backup business. For corporate files shares and databases we still run agent based backups. I reduced my traditional backups by more than 35TB implementing this.

My goal over the next few years is to minimize traditional backups as much as possible and get to SAN snaps for backup/recovery and archiving for long term retention. Traditional backups are too cumbersome, resource intensive and slow.

FYI,
Data Protector supports ZDB/IR with 3PAR which is Zero Downtime Backup and Instant Recovery using VSS for consistency. Basically the ZDB/IR feature integrates directly with 3PAR to provide application aware snapshots. These can be retained and rotated internally on the array, an entire volume can be instantly restored from snapshot, or they can also be mounted for individual item recovery. Also snapshots can be retained but streamed to tape / disk device or both for replication or longer term retention.

From memory ZDB is licensed per TB protected, so if you have to protect 10TB's of production data in this manner, regardless of the number of copies retained you would need a single 10TB license. Don't have links to the latest version, DP 8.x I think, but here's a white paper for an older version covering similar.
http://goo.gl/VZDGB2