When to create a new partition?

[Contonso]

Hi,

need to understand and clarify something...

We are running EV8 SP2 and are currently enabling 60 mailboxes per day aprox. 400 users are enabled. We have in total 2000 mailboxes.

Our Vault store partition contains currently round about 2 mio. files and is 180GB big. Space on the disks is not the problem.  But I am afraid about our Backup.
I know that our system needs round about 4hrs for a full backup (OS+Index+DB+VS) in the weekend. Of course most of the this time is needed for the Vault Store Partition.
I have not enabled CAB files.

My idea was to close the partition an create a new one to avoid backuping the closed partiotion every weekend. But we have the option "delete from Vault" enabled.

So the question is:

- Can I close the partition and create a new one although deleting is enabled?
- What can I do in case of a disaster recovery? Because DB and vault store would be inconsistent if deleting is enabled,  right?
- What is your recomendation? How should I proceed? What is you experience?

Thanks and regards

[MichelZ]

Hi there A closed partition is not "read only". Deleted savesets will still be deleted in closed partitions. as for the inconsistency, you should have a look at EVSVR, which is able to get rid of inconsistencies after a desaster recovery. Keep in mind that because of those reasons (closed partition is not 100% read only) you would still need to back it up from time to time, i.e. once a month) Hope that helps Cheers Michel

[Liam_Finn1]

Why dont you consider doing differential backups instead of full ones each night?

Each weekend, lets say Sunday, you do a full then Monday - Saturday do a differential.

Yes it will mean that you will require two tapes to do a recovery if needed but it will shrink your backup window

[Contonso]

Hi Michel and Liam,

@Michel,
That's sounds good.
Is there a general recomendation about closing the partition i.e. contained items or of  the size of the partition. Or is it depending on the used backup solution?

@Liam
We are running an incremental backup each day and a full backup each Saturday. The problem is the full backup with the aprox. 2mio. items.
The full backup has to catch them one by one and of course this takes time.


What would happen if I also enable CAB files with the "delete from Vault" option? Would it unpacked, deleted and packed again?


I think I will create a new partition and close the current one. The closed one will be backed up one once a month as you wrote Michel and the the new one each Saturday until it reaches also 2mio. items then I will close also this and create a new one and so on.  So my limit would be 2mio. Items in a pratition.  What do you think?

Thanks.

[Liam_Finn1]

May I ask what kind of backup device are you using.

Are you backing up locally, over a SAN via NDMP or across the network?

Are you backing up to disk or tape. What throughput are you presently getting

Maybe there is a way to help the performance of your backup even if you have 2 million items we can come up with some ideas to help speed things up for you

The partition info from Michel is spot on and I have learned to never argue with him he is a Guru on EV.

[Contonso]

Liam,

this is a special dep. in our company I will ask my collegues regarding the troughput and will come up to you tomorrow.
What I definately can say is that we are using a solution called "NetWorker". We are backing up across the network. Data is stored on disks not on tapes.

What we thought was to back up at FS layer not at file layer (only full backup). Than the backup would be very fast.
But than the problem is the archive trigger bit. You know, to get the the items from pending to a shortcut. And we need to build exceptions into the whole backup process. This would be to complicated.

I am just wondering how other users/customers are handling backup and partitions in EV.

Thanks.





 

[Liam_Finn1]

We are presently using Arcserve ( yeah i hang my head in shame but it is company standard) We have one server with an attached LTO3 backup library which performs all the backups of our EV environment. 

But good news we will be moving to EMC Avamar later this year.

Also we only backup our index and SQL because our actual archived data is on Centera

[MichelZ]

We are backing up Vault Store data using NDMP. (VS is on a NetApp device), and then use a custom application which queries NetWorker for the last successful backup time of the NetApp device and then generate the trigger file...

You could even do this using a batch file, I believe.

Cheers
Michel

[Contonso]

Hi Liam,

got the information from my collegue:
Backup runs across the network and SAN on a VTL.

The troughput differs:

EV_DB_Backup 53 MB/s
EV_Index 4,4 MB/s
EV_Vault Store 1,2 MB/s

Thanks.

[Liam_Finn1]

Going from this i assume your Indexes and Vault Stores are backed up across the network because of the speed.

That is why your backups are so slow.

I'm assuming bu the speed that your EV servers are on a different network segment to the backup server. If yes you are going across a router to get to your archive servers it could explain the slowness. If the archive servers were on the same network segment as the backup device then there would be no routing of the traffic so any RSM or router would not be included in handeling the backup traffic and the backups would be faster. Also having a private network for backup increases backup speed as there is no contention for throughput on the network kink when backups are in place.

I'm sure with a more detailed look at your environment any decent network guy could help you increase the backup performance seeing as it seems to be across the network. I get way faster backup than that because I use a private network for backups and my backups is across a network

[Contonso]

Thanks Liam,

I will forward these infos to my colleagues.

I will let you know.