Forum Discussion

dragon9994's avatar
dragon9994
12 years ago
Solved

Architecture question

We have Netbackup 7.5 Standard installed on windows 2008 R2 on a single combined Master/Media server.  Our backup pool is an iSCSI attached device called StorSimple.  We have created 5 drives which we mapped to 5 storage units. 

We are backing up 5 servers, with about 4 million files per server.  The size of each server is between 3 and 10 TB.  We have 1Gbe connection between the Master/Media server and each of clients/servers.  Our nightly backup window is 12 hours.

My question is this single server design supposed to be able to handle the work load that we are asking of it? 

 

Thanks

Mike

7.5
Backup and Recovery
Basics
Configuring
Installing
NetBackup
Windows Server (2003-2008)
  • Marianne's avatar
    Marianne
    12 years ago

    The 1Gb NIC in the master server can at best receive client data at 100Mbytes/sec.

    Even a 48-hour backup window over a weekend will not be enough to backup your 5 clients over the network.

    Best to connect backup devices to the clients and install them as SAN Media servers (Enterprise Client License) to allow them to backup themselves.

    You may also want to consider Media Server Deduplication, then use Client side dedupe with Accellerator to minimize network transfer. The first backup for each client will take a long time, but thereafter only changed blocked will be transfered over the network.

    Correct sizing for dedupe storage is crucial. Best to engage with a Symantec Partner that can assess your environment and suggest best possible solution.

  • Nate_D1's avatar
    Nate_D1
    Level 6
    12 years ago

    We have a similar enterprise setup. We backup far more servers and more files. Our nightly backup window is about 12 hours as well. Our incremental's take about 4-5 hours and our fulls can take over 24 hours.  The only difference I see is we have fibrechannel connections to our servers though.  I think this sort-of answers your question, as we are another real-world example of what you are doing, working. :)

    Are you trying to do nightly fulls? I think you will run into backup window issues if so.

  • Marianne's avatar
    Marianne
    Level 6
    12 years ago

    The 1Gb NIC in the master server can at best receive client data at 100Mbytes/sec.

    Even a 48-hour backup window over a weekend will not be enough to backup your 5 clients over the network.

    Best to connect backup devices to the clients and install them as SAN Media servers (Enterprise Client License) to allow them to backup themselves.

    You may also want to consider Media Server Deduplication, then use Client side dedupe with Accellerator to minimize network transfer. The first backup for each client will take a long time, but thereafter only changed blocked will be transfered over the network.

    Correct sizing for dedupe storage is crucial. Best to engage with a Symantec Partner that can assess your environment and suggest best possible solution.