Just got a SANS and want to use for Backup Exec dedupe partition

[macpiano]

I just got a SANS which will be about 10.5 TB with RAID 50. I currently am using dedupe on my backup server with about a 4 Tb partition which I have used about 3TB for a couple months backup. Is there a way to just start using a volume on the new SANS and knowing that I have used about 3 TB so far for a couple months what would be a good size for growth? Are there best practices for using a SAN for dedupe etc. I do NOT want to use up the whole SAN for backups. thanks

[DoubleEM]

These two are links for dedup best practices:

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=HOWTO21767

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=HOWTO59043

[macpiano]

It looks like I can use my dedupe folder on the server itself and a dedupe folder on the SANS?

[teiva-boy]

No, only one Dedupe folder per BE server.

And it's SAN not SANS ;p  Sounds like you bought an Equallogic?  Not many oflks advertise a RAID50 cocnfig...  If you did do Equallogic, you need to leverage either 10Gbe, or multiple 1Gb links with MPIO enabled to get any real performance out of those SAN arrays.

[macpiano]

I bought 2 of them so yeah it's SANs I guess, 2 different buildings. It is an Equallogic and would you go RAID 50? I do not like losing all the space that RAID takes up. This SAN has 2 1 gig ports and 2 1 gig ports that are on the redundant ethernet but I believe they only fire up if the first eth controller gets hosed. How do I configure MPIO, is it on the SAN or the Powerconnect switches or both. thanks

[Simon_B_]

As said before you can only create one dedup folder, so you will have to move the folder to the new storage.

The procedure is outlined here: http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH160832

[teiva-boy]

Equallogic has some of the best documentation from a storage vendor in the business.  Look up their MPIO documentation for a howto on it.

In a nutshell, you're able to leverage all of the links in a round-robin fashion (recommended).  This way eacch connection that is opened from client to storage, a new NIC session is established.  It's not doubling bandwidth, but it better distributes the load across all the links in an MPIO trunk.

In the BackupExec world, the more concurrent backup jobs you have running, the better it can leverage the links and distribute the backups from backup server to EQL storage.