cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Appliances / VTL etc

Kev_Lamb
Level 6

Hi,

With the impending end of life for the HP VLS family I am now looking at alternatives for our Backup Environment, HP have given us the pitch on their B6200 StoreOnce systems which can be set ups as VTL / NAS or StoreOnce Catlyst (Disk), does anyone on the forum use one of these and if so how are they configured? I really want to move away from the VTL set-up as the impact of not allowing multiplexing due to the dedupe method does have an impact on the backup window as it is one tape drive per client backup and the setting up of multiple tape devices is just crazy.

I would like to backup directly to disk and have the data deduplicated and replictaed between two sites, this we could do with the StoreOnce Catalyst (well that is what we have been informed), I would also like to concider the Netbackup Appliances that are available, does anyone have real world experience of these and if so what are the configuration options and what is deduplication like using PureDisk, we currently get approx 4:1 deduplication on the VLS as a whole with individulal clients getting appeox 8:1 deduplication.

Any input would be appreciated as I would like to check out all avenues.

 

Kev

Attitude is a small thing that makes a BIG difference
1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION

Accepted Solutions

Douglas_A
Level 6
Partner Accredited Certified

For the HP appliance i have a writeup i did for another customer i would like to share here.


Hp D2D/StorOnce Limitations

·         Share File limit of 25k Files

o   This is an issue because when Netbackup writes a backup it contains 2 files, a header and fragment file, this knocks the backup count down to 12k files, this is further limited when the D2D appliance also write stub files for each of the Netbackup files. This now changes each share to a max of 4k backups before filling, once full all backups fail.

·         Global Dedupe Limit

o   Global Deduplication is referred to the ability to deduplicate across an entire set of dedupe disk. So any data on an appliance should be able to deduplicate against other data on the same appliance. The D2D limits this by only allowing Deduplication on a per share basis, this will limit overall Deduplication ratios on the appliance and cause more space to be used than should be.

·         Deduplication file size

o   The D2D does not deduplicate files smaller than 25mb, this normally isn’t an issue because the majority of backup are larger than this however there are always going to be a few that will be under 25mb and can be deduplicated.

·         Blackout Windows

o   The D2D requires a set blackout window to perform maintenance activities, when this window is active no backups/restores can be done. This window currently lasts only a short period of time but as the system fills the window will need to get larger to accommodate the maintenance activities. Some system (example only) with 50TB of used space can take 4-6 hours for this activity.

·         Restore/Backup Parallelism

o   The D2D appliance is not designed to do simultaneous read and write, per HP it is designed to do only backup or only restore. When both are attempted the other will suffer greatly. (EXAMPLE, when a backup was writing at 90MB/Sec a restore started and the backup throughput dropped to 100kb/sec)

 


For the Symantec Applaince things are done VERY differently.. The Dedupe rates will vary from data type to data type and to be honest some tuning of the block size can help alot when it comes to dedupe ratios. Puredisk uses a standard 128K block but this can be tuned in the conf files.

One other thing to note is that the appliance allows for Global dedupe, this term is used very widly in the appliance community meaning anything written to the Appliance is available to be deduplicated against, vs some other solutions which only allow a per share or per volume type of dedupe.

 

Hope this was helpful.

 

View solution in original post

4 REPLIES 4

Douglas_A
Level 6
Partner Accredited Certified

For the HP appliance i have a writeup i did for another customer i would like to share here.


Hp D2D/StorOnce Limitations

·         Share File limit of 25k Files

o   This is an issue because when Netbackup writes a backup it contains 2 files, a header and fragment file, this knocks the backup count down to 12k files, this is further limited when the D2D appliance also write stub files for each of the Netbackup files. This now changes each share to a max of 4k backups before filling, once full all backups fail.

·         Global Dedupe Limit

o   Global Deduplication is referred to the ability to deduplicate across an entire set of dedupe disk. So any data on an appliance should be able to deduplicate against other data on the same appliance. The D2D limits this by only allowing Deduplication on a per share basis, this will limit overall Deduplication ratios on the appliance and cause more space to be used than should be.

·         Deduplication file size

o   The D2D does not deduplicate files smaller than 25mb, this normally isn’t an issue because the majority of backup are larger than this however there are always going to be a few that will be under 25mb and can be deduplicated.

·         Blackout Windows

o   The D2D requires a set blackout window to perform maintenance activities, when this window is active no backups/restores can be done. This window currently lasts only a short period of time but as the system fills the window will need to get larger to accommodate the maintenance activities. Some system (example only) with 50TB of used space can take 4-6 hours for this activity.

·         Restore/Backup Parallelism

o   The D2D appliance is not designed to do simultaneous read and write, per HP it is designed to do only backup or only restore. When both are attempted the other will suffer greatly. (EXAMPLE, when a backup was writing at 90MB/Sec a restore started and the backup throughput dropped to 100kb/sec)

 


For the Symantec Applaince things are done VERY differently.. The Dedupe rates will vary from data type to data type and to be honest some tuning of the block size can help alot when it comes to dedupe ratios. Puredisk uses a standard 128K block but this can be tuned in the conf files.

One other thing to note is that the appliance allows for Global dedupe, this term is used very widly in the appliance community meaning anything written to the Appliance is available to be deduplicated against, vs some other solutions which only allow a per share or per volume type of dedupe.

 

Hope this was helpful.

 

Kev_Lamb
Level 6

Many thanks Douglas that has certainly helped.

 

Kev

Attitude is a small thing that makes a BIG difference

Amer_Vilagran
Level 3
Accredited Certified

Hi Douglas A,

Thank you very much for your comments. We are considering the HP B6200 StoreOnce solution, as well as, after reading your post, the Symantec Appliances. I am concerned about the 25K files limit you mentioned. Do you know if those limitations also apply to the B6200 StoreOnce using the OST plug-in ?

Environment are server nbu 7.5 domains on windows 2008 R2 master/medias server and clients.

 

Douglas_A
Level 6
Partner Accredited Certified

Please remember to mark as solution if this anser has met your requirments.