Need to map normal drives

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Jan
Posts: 2
Joined: Mon Oct 31, 2005 8:07 pm

Mon Oct 31, 2005 8:11 pm

Hi!

Excuse my bad english...

I need to connect to the disk drives on one of my server. The server use this disk to store some application data and i need to backup these data from my storage node.

So the server has to see the drive as a normal disk drive and I have to connect to this drive from my storage node as a normal disk dive.

I've tried this but with no success.

SANMelody for example requires an unformatted, unpartitioned disk but then the server itself cannot use it anymore.

Hope, you understand what I want :)

Thanx

Regards,

Jan
Val (staff)
Posts: 496
Joined: Tue Jun 29, 2004 8:38 pm

Tue Nov 01, 2005 8:34 am

Jan,

I'd suggest you using other way to backup your server's data.
Install StarWind on your backup machine and create an ImageFile target to be used as the backup storage.

On the server side install the MS initiator or our StarPort, connect to the backup target, partition and format it and assign a persistent drive letter to it.
So your server will see an additional 'local' drive and save backup data to it. Or you could use some kind of batch files called by the Scheduler to backup your data on the server.

According to sharing a single disk target between 2 machines - this is not a good idea if you use the standard Windows filesystems (FAT32 or NTFS). The filesystems suppose they are the only user of an underlying partition, so they have no idea some other entity is changing the volume's data at the time they access or update it.
This definitely will lead to corruption of the drive's data.

I hope this helps.
Jan wrote:Hi!

Excuse my bad english...

I need to connect to the disk drives on one of my server. The server use this disk to store some application data and i need to backup these data from my storage node.

So the server has to see the drive as a normal disk drive and I have to connect to this drive from my storage node as a normal disk dive.

I've tried this but with no success.

SANMelody for example requires an unformatted, unpartitioned disk but then the server itself cannot use it anymore.

Hope, you understand what I want :)

Thanx

Regards,

Jan
Best regards,
Valeriy
Jan
Posts: 2
Joined: Mon Oct 31, 2005 8:07 pm

Wed Nov 02, 2005 7:35 am

Hi Valery,

thanks for your reply.

I can't use your solution, cause the server to back up resides in a DMZ so only access INTO this DMZ is possible not OUT from the DMZ to our LAN. The direction makes the sense.

So if I install SW on my backup machine and connect FROM the server TO it, the direction is wrong.

I could mount the drives from the server but our backup solution cannot backup files on a network drive. So the initial question was to make a network drive virtually available as a fixed drive so our backup solution works.

Any other ideas?

Thanks,

Jan
Val (staff)
Posts: 496
Joined: Tue Jun 29, 2004 8:38 pm

Wed Nov 02, 2005 10:55 am

Hi Jan,

Running an iSCSI server in DMZ is not a recommended solution. iSCSI includes very limited protaction against hackers, etc and should be used in a managed network or over a VPN.
Is it possible to create a IPSec channel from the server in DMZ and the backup server? In the case my previous suggestion could work.

It's possible to install StarWind to the server and share the whole hard drive with SPTI in read-only mode, so your backup server will be able to access some 'snap-shot' of the disk. But there are no way to be sure the snapshot will be in a state that could be restored then. If the services change files continiously - there is little sense to have such read-only access to the drive...
Jan wrote:Hi Valery,

thanks for your reply.

I can't use your solution, cause the server to back up resides in a DMZ so only access INTO this DMZ is possible not OUT from the DMZ to our LAN. The direction makes the sense.

So if I install SW on my backup machine and connect FROM the server TO it, the direction is wrong.

I could mount the drives from the server but our backup solution cannot backup files on a network drive. So the initial question was to make a network drive virtually available as a fixed drive so our backup solution works.

Any other ideas?

Thanks,

Jan
Best regards,
Valeriy
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