What is the best way to use NetBackup Appliance to backup large NAS system

Hi,

Last year I implemented the same type of solution, NBU 5220 + VNX NAS.

We tested both options, Accelerator and NDMP backup type. Much to my surprise the NDMP method actually out performed / matched the Accelerator method. Large restores from the accelerator file backups were slow for some reason though. However this might have been environmental as they we're using HyperV guests to mount the NAS.

To use the accelerator you have to get a standard client to mount the NAS and then you use accelerator to backup the FS as if it belonged to that client. So data travels from the NAS to the client then to appliance. I've heard a suggestion to just do the mount of the NAS on the appliance but never tried that. At least that would remove one hop from the chain.

In the end the client decided to go with NDMP, Full on weekend and INCR in the week. They're also still running the accelerator once a month to have a backup that can be restored to something other than a NAS (or if they want to switch vendors as NDMP restore is only supported on like hardware)

Lots of factors actually come into play when using de-dupe, especially during restores etc.

This can be affected by having a very large fragment size for the storage unit in particular

Accelerator tunining is also important for performance - siply by increasing the number of worker threads you can have an appliance cope with accelerator backups far better

The "offical" test figures i have seen show the initial Accelerator backup will take longer than the NDMP backup,but after that it should be much quicker - and if setup and tuned properly the restores should be good too.

Assuming that this is a new installation i assume you will be going with NetBackup 7.6.0.1 in which case it is unlikely that you will get many people give you a comparison in view of how new it is - but the official appliance figures show a huge improvement from 7.5 to 7.6 - plus, being applianced based you can take advantage of having a 72TB de-dupe pool which you cannot do on anything else

So the figures look a bit like this:

Single stream backup with no de-dupe: 7.5 was 150MB/s, 7.6 is 500 MB/s

16 stream backup with 98% de-dupe: 7.5 was 366 MB/s, 7.6 is 1029 MB/s

longevity 8 stream restore (what ever that means!) : 7.5 was 90 MB/s, 7.6 is 362 MB/s

Lots of DD comparison figures out now too which claims up to 53x faster

I know it is all sales and marketing but it does look like 7.6 is a major step forward when used on an appliance but as it is pretty knew you may not find anyone that has fully put it to the test yet

Hope this all helps