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psp_veritas's avatar
psp_veritas
Level 2
7 years ago

NetBackup Appliance MSDP Supported Capacity

Hi All,

Deciding about selecting appliance or staying on open server for media server. 

I am going for v8.0. From the appliance guide, I am curious that why MSDP supported to be growing upto 64TB, or 96TB on Linux, but for appliance can be upto 114TB or more .... depends on the model.

What are the differences? I know that inside the appliance is SLES, whiich is not different if I install SLES in open system server (HP). While I have a server which is available to use with very high performance (with many SSDs, RAM, CPU), but only thing that make me in doubt is only 96TB for MSDP that I could use, if I don't want to waste my server, don't want to spend more by going for appliance. Can I adjust something in my server to support sizing the same thing as appliance does?

Please help,

Thank you very much.

 

  • Marianne's avatar
    Marianne
    7 years ago

    We have asked our local Veritas SE the same question.

    His answer was:

    With 'Build your own' there are too many variables outside Veritas's control - such as these characteristics of an appliance: optimized OS, hardware components, the Veritas Volume manager and filesystem and the fact that a NBU admin does not need any knowledge of the Volume Manager in order to grow or shrink volume layouts.
    There were more reasons mentioned that I cannot remember now...

    I agree with Mouse - ask your local SE to put you in contact with PM.

  • josef_honc1's avatar
    josef_honc1
    7 years ago

    You can purchase InfoScale Foundation and use VxFS to overcome that limit, but still you will be running an unsupported solution. The probability that you will face issues with this configuration is quite high and run an unsupported environment is too risky.

    Regards

    Josef

  • Mouse's avatar
    Mouse
    7 years ago

    You can't span mountpoints and MSDP don't support multiple volumes unlike some other OST and notably used to support PureDisk (RIP). But yes, you can mimic 95% of software configuration of the appliances using COTS components but what you will be missing still is a formal supportability of the solution

    I can tell you a story from my experience which goes back a few years, that time 5220s were new appliances and quality control was pretty horrible, so a customer of ours purchased a few boxes and we tried to get them running, after a few months and major RMA/replacements of various components we were able to bring them up only just to hear that the customer has lost confidence in the solution and wanted their money back. Fast forward one or two years after that, the customer need a solution to store data on disk and goes with BYO stuff from their server vendor. Everything is fine until they trying to write more than 7 streams to MSDP, the performance drops dramatically. Just removing MSDP out of picture and putting any random app from Oracle to NBU's Advanced Disk solves the issue immediately. Because the issue is not obvious, however the RAID controller was suspected, they could not RMA two large capacity / high performance servers with their vendor because with all other tests they were working fine. Who is at fault? Not clear. The customer was upset again.

    Fast forward two years to today, they decided to try a pair of 5330s and very happy.

    At the same time I know heaps of my other customers who run BYO MSDP and happy with them.

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  • Marianne's avatar
    Marianne
    Level 6
    7 years ago

    We have asked our local Veritas SE the same question.

    His answer was:

    With 'Build your own' there are too many variables outside Veritas's control - such as these characteristics of an appliance: optimized OS, hardware components, the Veritas Volume manager and filesystem and the fact that a NBU admin does not need any knowledge of the Volume Manager in order to grow or shrink volume layouts.
    There were more reasons mentioned that I cannot remember now...

    I agree with Mouse - ask your local SE to put you in contact with PM.

    • psp_veritas's avatar
      psp_veritas
      Level 2
      7 years ago

      Hi Marianne,

      Thanks a lot for your clarification.

      I got the point. It seems that the limitation of OS' maximum filesystem size limit the space to keep data for Netbackup, then VxFS comes to play to overcome this limitation.

      The only solution to make my HP server to achieve beyond beyond 64TB or 96TB space (if I don't spend more for VxFS) is to configure MSDP use space across more than one filesystem. (which I don't know if it is possible. I take a look into my old 7.6 system, MDSP is stored in one path, and don't know if it has option to add mountpoints, and let MSDP span the use of all of them, which I tried to find the way and found nothing). Or I miss something which could let possible to span across mountpoints?

       

      • Mouse's avatar
        Mouse
        Moderator
        7 years ago

        You can't span mountpoints and MSDP don't support multiple volumes unlike some other OST and notably used to support PureDisk (RIP). But yes, you can mimic 95% of software configuration of the appliances using COTS components but what you will be missing still is a formal supportability of the solution

        I can tell you a story from my experience which goes back a few years, that time 5220s were new appliances and quality control was pretty horrible, so a customer of ours purchased a few boxes and we tried to get them running, after a few months and major RMA/replacements of various components we were able to bring them up only just to hear that the customer has lost confidence in the solution and wanted their money back. Fast forward one or two years after that, the customer need a solution to store data on disk and goes with BYO stuff from their server vendor. Everything is fine until they trying to write more than 7 streams to MSDP, the performance drops dramatically. Just removing MSDP out of picture and putting any random app from Oracle to NBU's Advanced Disk solves the issue immediately. Because the issue is not obvious, however the RAID controller was suspected, they could not RMA two large capacity / high performance servers with their vendor because with all other tests they were working fine. Who is at fault? Not clear. The customer was upset again.

        Fast forward two years to today, they decided to try a pair of 5330s and very happy.

        At the same time I know heaps of my other customers who run BYO MSDP and happy with them.

  • Mouse's avatar
    Mouse
    Moderator
    7 years ago

    Just a couple of clarifications - now it's RHEL not SLES and yeah, it's been discussed a few times already. Veritas has a supportability rule you can discuss with your sales rep who may or may not bring it all the way upwards to PM. Depending on how important you as a customer are to Veritas. I've seen things getting supported outside of standard rules for important guys, and careless sales reps who wouldn't go extra mile. But I would not hold my breath, tbh