Hopefully someone can help me with this, we purchased NB 6.5 four months ago and then got side tracked on installing everything so I can't remember how it had all been planned out with the sales rep at the time. I just got an upgrade to 7 notification so I figure might as well use that since we haven't even installed it yet. So, what we had originally envisioned was running one beefy server connected to a large storage array and a large tape library, backups come from the clients to disk, de-dupe happens on the server, what's left is written to tape for archival purposes or for restores from dates beyond what is kept on disk. We don't want cpu activity on the clients related to de-duplication as our servers are compute-bound.
We have a box with dual quad-core cpu's and 32 GB of memory, it's got 5 TB of disk and a tape library. Can we do all in one or would that be asking for trouble? Currently we have an older netbackup install that's doing straight to tape backups for about 350 servers with a concurrency of 12 going to two LTO3 drives and it's working fine, obviously its not doing backup to disk or de-dupe.
What we've got purchased is described as:
SYMC NETBACKUP DEDUPLICATION OPTION 7.0 XPLAT 1 FRONT END TBYTE STD LIC
VRTS NETBACKUP PUREDISK 6.5 XPLAT 1 TBYTE FRONT END CAPACITY STD LIC
I'm honestly not sure what the difference is between puredisk and "deduplication option" in the 7.0 license or if it's just the two merged together now. First question is can the combination of what we've bought accomplish what we want irrespective of hardware; i.e. can we back all the clients up to disk, de-duplicate that data on disk, then write it to tape? I don't care if we can only restore from tape but would prefer to restore from disk if it's present, otherwise hit the tape.
Assuming the question of whether we can do what we want is yes, can we do it all with one server? We don't have a lot of data to back up, at least initially, and it will probably take a long time before we'd reach 1 TB to back up with this server. If the answer is no, what do we need, and what is optimal, obviously both would be considered.
Thanks in advance,
David