NAS backup - Terasation Pro II

[Brandon]

Recently, I picked out, and purchased a Buffalo TeraStation Pro II (Rackmount) with specifications decided on by me and the rest of my team. Sadly, we over looked one small detail. We currently use Symantec Backup Exec, which hits everything in our environment. This doesn’t include Linux based NAS systems sadly.

From what I can tell, we have a few options, none of which sound great however. The first would require us to have a secondary server using NTBackup to make a quick backup of the drive, and post it for our real backup to process.

The second idea is to send it back, and spend more for a system that uses 2003 storage server. We are an all windows shop (Well, aside from our ESX hosts) so this would probably be best, but I’ve never been one for sending stuff back that still works.

Third option: Reload with an OS that is either windows or windows emulating. I’ve spent several hours reading on different methods of replacing the built in OS, however do we really want to go that far for a production piece of hardware?

This device was purchased to remove over 100 GB of Outlook PST files from our file server. The load on our file server has been overwhelming, causing quite a few issues with our users. A NAS came to mind as a place to store them away from our mail file server and available for backup.

Just wondering if anyone’s ever had a similar situation, either with Backup Exc, or the TeraStation. I would also like to hear if anyone’s replaced the OS.

Thanks for reading my wall-o-text,
-Brandon

 

[mindbender]

regarding symantec backup exec:
have you mounted the samba share from any server (with "net use" or simply as a network drive) ? does symantec backup exec then ignore it? is there no way to backup remote shares via ssh/smb/rsync?

regarding replacing the OS:
impossible to replace with windows. reason is that it uses a complete different CPU architecture than the x86 that you are used to on all your workstation/servers. the terastation pro II is based on the Marvell Orion Design and therefore is uses a ARM based CPU. your terastation pro II btw is running linux and you can get access to the shell with a tool (coded by a member of our nas-central.org community) called acp_commander.

http://buffalo.nas-central.org/download/TOOLS/ALL_LS_KB_ARM9/ACP_COMMANDER/

if you have a linux guy then i am sure he can help you. in case you have further questions ask them at the forum section dedicated to this box:
http://buffalo.nas-central.org/forums/viewforum.php?f=22&

-- mindbender
http://nas-central.org

 

[Brandon]

I'm the closest thing to a linux guy that we have, sadly.

As for the shell access, I've been looking into that, trying to find a loophole with backup exec. I've looked into a few other options like this however I'm a bit iffy on using something like this for production though.

I'm getting fairly desperate with that said. Over the weekend our file server hit 3 GB's of free space, which in tern converted the drive to read only. This caused quite a few processes to hang.

As for backup exec, it creates backups by logging into the Server, and only makes backups of the physical machine (Well, virtual in our case, but you get the idea).

 

[Brandon]

So to anyone that runs into something like this.. The solution that became of this wasn't quite what you would normally think of.. It's now set up with an NFS share to one of our ESX host servers, which takes a Snapshot of it, then places the snapshot onto the array attached to our backup server..

Over complicated, but it works..