Backup Exec won't backup Isilon Cluster

[bdelland]

Infrastructure details:

Backup Exec 12.5 running on Windows 2008 Server for Tape Backup

(New-ish) Isilon Cluster running 6.5.x.x going to upgrade to 7.x.x.x

Hello,

I did some research on Symantec forums and white papers and found my current version of Backup Exec won't backup Isilon data through our network. However I found that if I upgrade to 2012 or the latest version of Backup Exec it will do the backups. My question is regarding if I require an Isilon Backup Accelerator or not. Does anyone have experience with this setup and know if I need one in addition to the software upgrade?

-bdelland

[CraigV]

Hi,

The BE 2012 HCL on the link shows that Isilon is supported, but doesn't state anything about the backup accelerator. Check below:

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH175582

Might also be worth your while to verify that BE doesn't require this by checking out the EMC e-labs Navigator:

https://elabnavigator.emc.com/

THanks!

[teiva-boy · Accepted solution]

The Accelerator is NOT required for NDMP backups.  WIthout it, backup traffic goes over Ethernet through the Backup Exec server, to your target (disk or tape)

If you had the accelerator, backup traffic would flow over Fiber Channel directly to fiber channel attached tape.  It's an option, that may or may not speed up backups.  It's best used if you don't want to affect cluster compute or network throughput, but offloading it to the accelerator.

[bdelland]

Thank you, this answers my questions.

[teiva-boy]

I just learned of a use case where the performance accelerator was used for NDMP backups.  Data flows over infiniband, to the accelerator, over 10GbE to your backup server.  Not taking away from the compute on the nodes.  It's a way to get better ethernet performance over NDMP, where as the bacckup accelerator gives you NDMP over FC.