Forum Discussion

DuckTape's avatar
DuckTape
Level 4
8 years ago

Replacing 5220 appliance with windows Lenovo server

I have been trying to find anything showing what is the best windows hardware configuration to replace 5220 appliances. we have appliances ,  master (with 51Tb) and a media server (51tb) on 2.7.3 ver...
  • sdo's avatar
    sdo
    8 years ago

    Various NetBackup Appliance QRC cards can give you a high level view of some of the basic hardware details of the various models and incarnations of the stock PBBA appliances:

    Consolidated List of NetBackup Appliance Quick Reference Cards

    http://www.veritas.com/docs/000023112

    .

    The thing is... an appliance is more than just a piece of tin.  It's a pre-tuned platform ready for NetBackup specific workloads.  If one stops for a moment and thinks about all of the man-hours that Symantec and Veritas have put in to defining requirements, scoping, sizing,  designing, rating components, selecting components, building, basic testing, performance testing, scale-out testing, tuning, tweaking, learning from customer feedback... well that's a lot of work and a lot of lessons learned.

    If one wanted to build one's own NetBackup work-horse, then the first stumbling block is... how would one scale it?  I'd have to ask myself, what I am trying to do?  Build an MSDP media server for 51TB of raw disk, or build an MSDP media server which can scale to the max supported for my own build - which I think is 96TB raw disk on RHEL.  But the 5230 and 5240 PBBA appliances can be larger than this.

    IMO, it's all about the quality of the components.  You certainly need at aleast two separate really good top performance RAID/SAS cards - and believe me, they are not cheap.  One for the O/S and application and MSDP mini catalog, and another the RAID pools for MSDP bulk storage.  Then you have to think about SAS expanders and sourcing your own disk trays.

    Depends on your definition of fun, but maybe this a back-burner idea to research in your own time whilst away from work.  My guess is that you'll spend about 50 to 60 man hours reseraching and acquiring pricing for various components, and still not know whether it will actually all work together, let alone fit together.  And 50 to 60 man hours is a fair amount of FTE cost.

  • Marianne's avatar
    Marianne
    8 years ago

    I notice that DuckTape has been very quiet... no response to any of the replies?

    Adding to the TN posted by D_Flood - not even Veritas Consulting or Consulting Partner can help with this kind of migration. 
    The Veritas catman tool supports migration TO NetBackup Appliance not FROM it.
    In this instance, only the team who developed the catman tool set - Stone Ram - can assist.
    Tagging StoneRam-Simon

    I am curious about the reason for wanting to move away from Appliances... ?

D_Flood's avatar
D_Flood
Level 6

I can't help with the sizing but I can tell you that you will want to replace your Master with something else running Linux/Unix unless you have $$$$ or want to start with a fresh catalog.

Switching your catalog from the Linux/Unix world to a Windows world is only supported by Veritas Consulting.  You can't do it on your own.

https://www.veritas.com/support/en_US/article.000026956

Also, unless you stick with Appliances, running a MSDP on a Master isn't recomended.  So you'll end up with three machines to do what you're doing now:  Master and two Storage Servers/MSDP's.

 

sdo's avatar
sdo
Moderator
8 years ago

Various NetBackup Appliance QRC cards can give you a high level view of some of the basic hardware details of the various models and incarnations of the stock PBBA appliances:

Consolidated List of NetBackup Appliance Quick Reference Cards

http://www.veritas.com/docs/000023112

.

The thing is... an appliance is more than just a piece of tin.  It's a pre-tuned platform ready for NetBackup specific workloads.  If one stops for a moment and thinks about all of the man-hours that Symantec and Veritas have put in to defining requirements, scoping, sizing,  designing, rating components, selecting components, building, basic testing, performance testing, scale-out testing, tuning, tweaking, learning from customer feedback... well that's a lot of work and a lot of lessons learned.

If one wanted to build one's own NetBackup work-horse, then the first stumbling block is... how would one scale it?  I'd have to ask myself, what I am trying to do?  Build an MSDP media server for 51TB of raw disk, or build an MSDP media server which can scale to the max supported for my own build - which I think is 96TB raw disk on RHEL.  But the 5230 and 5240 PBBA appliances can be larger than this.

IMO, it's all about the quality of the components.  You certainly need at aleast two separate really good top performance RAID/SAS cards - and believe me, they are not cheap.  One for the O/S and application and MSDP mini catalog, and another the RAID pools for MSDP bulk storage.  Then you have to think about SAS expanders and sourcing your own disk trays.

Depends on your definition of fun, but maybe this a back-burner idea to research in your own time whilst away from work.  My guess is that you'll spend about 50 to 60 man hours reseraching and acquiring pricing for various components, and still not know whether it will actually all work together, let alone fit together.  And 50 to 60 man hours is a fair amount of FTE cost.

  • sdo's avatar
    sdo
    Moderator
    8 years ago

    And with a PBBA you get all of the in-built hardware and software monitoring and alerting, and call home, and super easy CLIsh, and hot swap PSU and fans, and dedicated hardware support, and software support (if you renew) for a well defined system which is well known by the vendor support teams.  And a PBBA really is... open the crate, rack it, cable it, power-on, a really quite small amount of config work, and off-you go.

    I'm not poking fun here, really I'm not... this type of question is a bit like asking... I want it now, I want it good, and I want it cheap - and I don't want to put any effort in to it... and I want to be able to go to my boss and say... "Hey Boss!  I have an idea to save loads of money and do something excellent... so... give me an unknown amount of cash, and an unknown amount of time, and I might be able to build you something nearly as excellent as a PBBA - of course I don't know how excellent it will be, but I might get close.  Trust me!  Okay Boss?".

    Un-fun over... and serious now... have you ever seen the "triangle of quality", i.e. the trade-off between "quick" versus "good" versus "cheap"... where...

    quick + cheap = not so good

    cheap + good = not so quick

    good + quick = not so cheap

    ...see here:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_management_triangle

    • sdo's avatar
      sdo
      Moderator
      8 years ago

      To be fair though, I can remember being asked (a few years ago now) by a manager to find a cheaper alternative for backup storage... and after an awful lot of research and pricing... well, I couldn't find anything half as good as PBBA for less than half the price with no added risk.  Sure, I could have thrown a home-brew server up, with some home-brew SAS disk, and tried to make it work - but the IT directorship of the company wasn't interested in taking that kind of risk. So, we looked at branded solutions, e.g. HP Servers and smal/medium HP disk, and even that wasn't much cheaper (back then) for added man effort in building/installing/configuring.  Basically, the directors wanted to have to someone (and as few interlinked vendors as possible) to go back to if the backup technology broke down.

      I guess it depends on the nature of the business and the risks that they are willing to take.  About 6 or 7 years ago, the figure used to be that around 65% of commercial businesses actually fail within a year if they are not back on-line within three days of a DR.  I think the figure is probably even higher these days.  Backup still isn't important as front-line networking, compute and storage and it probably never will be... but the gap is shrinking... and it is becoming less and less tolerable to have even a slightly questionable backup infrastructure.  What I mean is, and yes I know money is money, but businesses tend to be just a little bit more interested in the quality and reliability of backup infrastructure these days, and less inclined to spend the minimum just to be able to put a tick in a box.

      • elanmbx's avatar
        elanmbx
        Level 6
        8 years ago

        I'm going to agree with sdo wholeheartedly.

        Esp on the part about support - having Veritas "on the hook" for hw & sw is likely to save you quite a bit of grief in the long-run.

        A long time ago I ran a NBU environment consisting of a master & 4 media servers, all running SPARC Solaris.  To be honest, it was a major PITA if you were at *all* interested in keeping the systems themselves update OS-wise.

        I'd say unless you have a LOT of extra time as an admin where you are really doing nothing valuable, trying to replace the appliances "on the cheap" is going to come back to haunt you.