[OpenAFS] will OpenAFS serve my needs?

[F. Even]

On Sun, Mar 30, 2008 at 4:15 PM, Christopher D. Clausen
<cclausen@acm.org> wrote:
> F. Even <openafslists@elitists.org> wrote:
>  > On Sun, Mar 30, 2008 at 2:09 PM, Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu>
>  > wrote:
>  >> "F. Even" <openafslists@elitists.org> writes:
>  >>
>  >>  > So...I guess another question then (that everyone probably dreads
>  >>  as > it's usually meaningless to real support of a product, but it
>  >>  gives > companies warm and fuzzies).  Are there any commercial
>  >>  products still > out there supporting OpenAFS?
>  >>
>  >>  Yes -- one example that comes to mind is Teradactyl's backup system.
>  >
>
> > Ah...you bring up another interesting point.  We use TSM for backups.
>  > Can the AFS "exports" be read as normal filesystems and be backed up
>
>  "Exports" is a NFS term.  One would not backup the data through the
>  /vicepXX partitions on the fileservers like one can with NFS.  You would
>  want to use an AFS client which should work just fine, provided you
>  understand circular mount points and how afs can link to foreign cells
>  and such.  And your backup software obviously needs an ACL to read the
>  data.

Yes, I'm aware...best analogy that I can come up with though.  ...and
I wasn't talking about an actual export as much as backing up the
shared space.

>  > to TSM...or would this data have to be flushed to a normal filesystem
>  > (using up additional space) to make available to TSM for backup
>  > purposes?
>
>  Some sites actually still use a TSM client for native AFS backups.  The
>  older TSM 5.1r17 or 5.1r18 client still supports AFS "buta" file level
>  backups.  Although you have to run the TSM backups from an AIX client
>  machine.

That shouldn't be an issue.  As of right now all the servers in the
environment are AIX which are clients to AIX TSM servers.  But
yes...some method of reliable and replicatable backup is necessary.
Business continuity/disaster recovery needs to be a consideration
also.