Enabling EV collection consideration ?

[John_Santana]

Hi All,

What's the benefits of enabling EEV collection and what is the disadvantage when using it in EV 9 ?

I need to know before I enable the feature that cannot be undone / Undo.

Thanks.

[TonySterling · Accepted solution]

They main thing is why are you considering enabling them?

The benefits are you will be able to back up your vault store partitions faster as there will be less small files to backup.

The disadvantage will be export speeds will be slower for DA and Clearwell. Index rebuilds will be slower and particularly for you, when you upgrade to EV 10 and want to convert to 64 bit indexes it will take longer as all the items will need to be extracted from cab files.

Those are a few off the top of my head. 

I typically don't recommend collections unless there is no other way.  If you are looking to speed up your backups you could look create smaller vault store partitions.

[JesusWept3 · Accepted solution]

I personally wouldn't do it.
There are always small issues with CAB files, some of them are 
 - Move Archive / PST Exports / Index rebuilds are slower because of CAB file extraction
 - More diskspace is used because of the items extracted from the CAB 
 - More diskspace can be used because of sparse collections
 - Sometimes CAB files get locked and you get access errors from apps like DA
 - Sometimes the counts of cab files get out of sync

Really the main benefit is supposedly backup, because backing up 1x10MB file as opposed to 200x5kb file, however if you use snapshots on NetApp or flash backup through NBU where it does it on a block level, you won't find any performance improvements what so ever

And like you said, it can't be undone.
But if you wanted to do migration to tertiary storage or tape, collections have to be enabled.

[John_Santana]

well, the priamry reason is for backup & restore improvements.

I'm using NBU 7.6 and backing it up to EMC Data Domain, So I guess this is the only way to do it.

I don;t have Clearwell and DA installed so I guess it doens't matter for me.

[JesusWept3]

If you use NBU, look at flash backup, it's far far far quicker than regular backups

[John_Santana]

Hi Jesus,

I'm using Netbackup 7.6.1 but the target device is to a tape & EMC Data Domain, so does the Flash Backup is a separate feature from NBU ?