NexentaStor has been lots of fun to work with, there are still a few hickups as mentioned earlier in my blog, but it is turning out to be a pretty cool solution for clients that are not wanting to throw down big bucks on boutique NAS/SANes during this recession. Oh, and do I hear de-dupe is around the corner for ZFS?! :)

I was experimenting around with the NDMP Backup options in NexentaStor. I enabled the service, and punched in the details of our Symantec BackupExec 12.5 server, with NDMP option enabled.

Not being really familiar with this option in BackupExec, I just set everything pretty much with the default, and unfortunately, when browsing for backup devices, Nexenta does not appear in the NDMP devices, so off I went and logged a support ticket with Nexenta.

Here is their response, not holding my breath, but it would be seriously kick ass if NDMP backups did work with BackupExec (not to mention would get great speed, and can point backups to "latest" folders within a special backup snapshot for example - nice point in time backups/archives to tape!)

Looks like we do not have many customers using BackupExec. In general, this is our policy to support 3rd party software only if there is enough evidence that this is either a standard, or used by a significant number of users (which would make it de-facto standard). BackupExec is neither. We may be able though to get to it after the next major release 3.0 planned for end of November, early Dec.

Now onto free space in NexentaStor. I do encourage you to keep a close eye on available space on your volumes. We were in a situation where a slight mistake in a rsync script, filled up our Nexenta box. We had on or less than 10% space left, and it ended up with some strange behaviour.

Everything from no access via web interface, the console on the server locking up when trying to remove snapshots via the web interface, and errors and dead drives appearing after scrub jobs were issued (which weren't really dead drives!). After we blew away a bunch of stuff, and snapshots via command line (setup snapshot destroy), things settled down again.

I really like the weekly reports that the system can send to you, surf through them just to make sure available space is in check, and all should be fine.