Forum Discussion

bc1410's avatar
bc1410
Level 5
4 years ago

Netbackup policy to stream to multiple tape drives

Hello We are using netbackup 8.1.1 in a windows 2012 R2 environement with a I500 quantum tape library consisting of 6 LT06 Drives.  The Windows Master server is the media server as well... How do I...
Not Applicable
  • Marianne's avatar
    Marianne
    4 years ago

    bc1410 

    With the speeds you are getting, you will not win anything by sending each stream to a different drive. The drives will wear out because of shoe-shining (too slow throughput)
    All of those streams can run concurrent to the same drive. 

    STU setting: MPX = 4
    Policy schedule: MPX = 4
    Max Jobs per Client = 4 (or more) 

bc1410's avatar
bc1410
Level 5

Hi Marianne -  Thanks for your Fast Response and taking my question.

When I run the policy with the selection path of  /share/*  - only 4 Streams start as there are only 4 main subdirs under the "/share" filesystem.

so the current throughput on the job details was as follows- (all of these streams were active as same time but only writing to one tape)

stream#1 - 31,747 KB/Sec - finished

stream#2 - 20,825 KB/Sec - finished

stream#3 - 15,972 KB/Sec - finished

stream#4 - 26,760 KB/sec - still running

Opscenter is showing this Master/media server having the following throughput - 22,351 KB/Sec

Also opscenter showing this linux client with the following throughput 9,378,463 KB/Sec

-------------------------

Basically the Stream#4 is the subdirectory that is taking forever to backup..  I figured if I could get the other streams to write to their own tape drives i could at least cut some time off...

To answer your questions about pushing 4 x streams in excess of 100MB/sec and other questions I will have to figure that out.. I understand what you are getting at now.

I will google for the netbackup perfromance tuning guide before i change anything.  This particular backup - Full level (about 12TB) takes pretty much all week to run when running with 1 stream and 1 drive.  

We have this policy schedule to run once a week (FULL) so basically as soon as it finishes it pretty much starts a new backup..  I inherited this backup server / environment so this is the way it has been for some time... Although the /share/ dir on this client is just getting bigger and bigger and therefore taking longer to run..

 

Thanks

BC

jnardello's avatar
jnardello
Moderator
4 years ago
Side note - if that problem share directory keeps getting bigger & taking longer and longer to back up, it might be time for a conversation with the client's owner about exactly what kind of data is IN there. Does it really require a weekly full ? Would a monthly full be sufficient with maybe weekly cumulatives ? Or is there maybe a directory in there that houses temp files for their in-flight application processing or such that could be skipped entirely ? Likewise, is it the number of files in that directory that's killing you, or is it smaller # of files but they're all huge ? It can be really helpful sometimes to dig for more info on your problem children before trying to re-architect anything fancy for them - I've had more than one user tell me, "Oh, you're backing that mess of a directory up ? Why ? " when I asked about a box having issues completing inside a window. =) Food for thought.