December 23, 2013 at 1:29 pm
My new employer uses NetBackup with the SQL Server plugin to back up SQL Servers directly to tape. Our SQL Server wait stats enterprise-wide indicate that our bottleneck is the tape backup. Not only that, the buggy NetBackup interface makes me nervous and makes restore testing very cumbersome. The backup tapes fill up so fast that I can rarely test a restore while the tape is still in the backup unit. I would like to move to a disk-disk-tape architecture and set up proper automated restore testing, perhaps weekly.
My plan is to create a large network share on a Windows file server, back up all database instances to that, and then use Netbackup on that share for file-based backup to tape. We would then phase out the usage of the NetBackup SQL plugin.
That being said, has anyone made a similar move? Any pointers?
December 23, 2013 at 2:17 pm
I haven't had to convert a whole environment before but definitely a couple servers in an environment. Your plan sounds good and you should realize some time savings in the tape backup processes as well if you are running netbackup on the server that the share is on.
A couple thoughts. First make sure that you build an alert to verify that you have backups for your databases. Secondly, I would want to run periodic restore tests that would involve getting a backup from tape, and then restoring that to an alternate location.
You should also check out Ola Hallengren's script to automate your backups. A huge time savings. http://ola.hallengren.com/sql-server-backup.html
Enjoy.
David
@SQLTentmaker“He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose” - Jim Elliot
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