Appliances in Real World

[Kev_Lamb]

Not sure if this is the right place for this, if not can the Mods please move it.

Our current set up is as follows:

Site1
1x RHEL Master Server, 2x RHEL Media Servers & HP B6200 StoreOnce

Site2
1x RHEL Master Server & HP B6200 StoreOnce

NBU7.7.1 but will be upgradng to 8 shortly, data is replicated to both sites using AIR and we have a mix of VM, HyperV, Unix and Windows fileshares, we currently get 8:1 deduplication on the data.

We are looking to replace the B6200's as they are out of waranty soon, the Veritas Appliance is on our radar and we have met with Veritas to have an overview of them but would like to get the real world view of the appliances, are they as good as the sales people say they are? are there any issues to look out for with the appliances? just wonder if people recommend them?

We have Hitachi sniffing around and we would probably have HP asking about replacing the kit but from what we have seen the Appliances seem to be a good way forward.

Thanks

Kev

[Mouse]

Look, appliances are not bad boxes, especially if you can get a good price from Veritas for competitive swap. Otherwise, pretty much all modern boxes provide a comparable dedupe rate, regardless what EMC and alike say, it's all about how much repetitive data you store rather than capability of the box. There are some benefits of having NBU appliances that are beyond just techinical capabilities, for example single point of contact for all problems. Having said that, I know customers who did not have any isssues with their OST devices during their lifetime so it could be a moot point for you.

I've been working with many customers with a mix of NBU and non-NBU OST storages and happy to share my experience.

[andrew_mcc1]

I'm probably biased as I worked in pre-sales for Appliances starting with the original PureDisk based 5000 unit; anyway my thoughts would be:

i) I agree dedupe rates are pretty similar for all modern enterprise dedupe devices. Also as they share the exact same s/w stack, NetBackup Appliances give the same dedupe rates as MSDP on "Build Your Own" NetBackup servers

ii) When comparing Appliances with "Build Your Own” MSDP, Veritas has performed a significant amount of testing and tuning in particular for the I/O and storage stack. I don’t believe you can simply assume just because a system has a similar high-level h/w spec to an Appliance it will deliver the same performance, especially for higher MSDP storage capacities

iii) When comparing with OST devices, Appliance benefits include not requiring separate Media Servers and support client side deduplication

iv) Appliances are pre-built and include alerting, call-home, security, single upgrade for all s/w components etc. They can therefore significantly reduce implementation and operational costs vs. "Build Your Own" servers, however they will likely have a higher capital cost. If comparisons are made on the basis of total cost of ownership, they will likely be competitive. If comparisons are made simply on the basis of capital costs, they will likely appear expensive

v) Appliances have some features not supported on other platforms which may be beneficial in a given scenario including: much higher MSDP storage capacity, Copilot for Oracle, AIR over Fibre Channel

vi) Although Appliances are supported as Master Servers, this can sometimes lead to issues e.g. third party schedulers are not supported, scripting options are limited and subsequent hardware migrations can be problematic. A virtualized Master may be a better solution in many cases

Hope this helps, Andrew

[ejporter]

I have been working with Netbakcup for a good many years.   For the last 5 years pretty much all appliances.   They work pretty well, and I think the price for the appliance is fairly reasonable compared to build your own.  The big advantage, is one vendor to support the whole stack.  And It is a simple solution if you have remotes sites.

You might also look athe virtual appliance for small sites, or dedicated master servers.

I have had challanges with them,  but no more than with a conventional netbackup environment.  And they have improved greatly since they introduced them.

[elanmbx · Accepted solution]

I have also been working with NetBackup for about 10 years - the last 6 or so almost exclusively with the appliances (5220-5240, 5330).  There definitely were some challenges when they were "young", but they have made significant strides since the early days.

Rehydration (to tape) was a significant challenge until 7.6.x came out.  VMware VADP backups have gotten MUCH better as well.

The biggest advantages for me:

• Single point of contact for issues.  Historically (with a "roll-your-own" environment) if you contacted Symantec on a tough performance issue, you would end up having to involve all sorts of parties.  For example, the OS vendor (Sun Micro), the fibrechannel vendor (EMC), the storage vendor (Hitachi) and they would spend inordinate amounts of time pointing fingers.
• DEAD SIMPLE UPGRADES - download the upgrade package, find a maintenance window of 4-6 hours, and run "INSTALL <upgrade package>" - keep in mind this often includes BIOS upgrades, PCI card firmware updates, OS updates, storage updates, disk firmware updates, etc.  Most admins I know would fight with all these aspects of system upgrades.
• DEAD SIMPLE REPLICATION - bring up the remote appliance, point SLPs at it, call it good.

Veritas has done a very good job with these appliances, IMO.