Question regarding Netbackup Network Infrastructure
Hi all, this is my first time post after a lot of reading at this forum.
I´ve got a big question regarding Netbackup recommendations in terms of backup elements connections.
Our company is designing a future network environment, and our backup servers (medias and master) will be part of it obviously. This new architecture will consist basically on access switches and CORE switches.
We (backup team) were expecting that the master and media servers will be connected to the CORE switch as the storage items (tapes and disk) are.Our surprise is that NETWORKING TEAM idea is to connect Media and MASTER to the ACCESS switches.
We are sure that it will impact the performance of the backups and so we need any kind of documentation (I couldn´t find anything on symantec manuals, white papers, best practices but sure I´ve not read everything) or experiences to help us on convincing them as we won´t be able to make tests until the new network is deployed and it would be later.
Can anyone of you help me on this? Thanks in advance.
You are focusing on the locations of the Netbackup servers, when what those documents are really saying (by not saying much on) is that it doesn't really matter.
Be it access, distribution, core or even cross site, for as long as you can have fast and sustainable transfers between nbu clients, servers and storage, and have high availability/redundancy on the connections, it is not a concern for Netbackup how you build your network.
If you network team could give you all that and more by putting all your stuff in access switches, then that's fine. (It's just that it would be an unusual network architecture, because the servers are not near the core, as you pointed out.)
we won´t be able to be sure if ti works until late
That's what the planning tuning guide is for. You have to plan ahead.
In a perfect world (unlikely i know...), as a backup admin you should be able to just give your network team those requirements, let them work out the architecture stuff, where to place your backup servers, clients, storage, etc.
For example, without having to specify whether it is placed at core or access, you might say to the network team something like: "The Netbackup media server needs to intake alot of backup traffic from many clients simultaneously, give it 10Gb lan, or 2/4Gb LACP teaming, or something. 1Gb is a bottleneck and is therefore unacceptable."
And let them work it out. They will likely come to the conclusion that your Nbu servers will need to be placed near/at the core based on your requirements. If they don't, but your exact requirements could still be fulfilled, then that's ok for Netbackup too.
