Evening everyone,

I’ve been tasked with researching backup and DR options for a our NetApp environment (a couple of Petabytes of mixed audio/video data, millions of files) and would love to hear what others are doing in production.

Our main challenge:
We need a disk-based daily backup solution that can leverage NetApp snapshots without causing cold data to move back to hot storage during backup operations. We have looked at Veeam and use it already internally. However to backup the NetApp it is very expensive. We would like to compare against other products.

Separately, we also have a requirement for a long-term tape-based archive (think multi-year retention), but that’s considered a different workflow — the primary goal right now is to find a day-to-day backup solution that works efficiently with tiered storage.

If you’re managing large NetApp volumes, I’d love to know:

• What backup product(s) you’re using (and why)
• How you handle cold vs. hot data tiering during backups
• Whether your solution integrates cleanly with NetApp snapshot technology
• Gotchas or lessons learned at this kind of scale

Thanks in advance for sharing your setups and experiences!