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Exchange backup solutions

FlyMountain
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We have a big MS Exchange environment around 20TB needs to be backed up daily with granular enabled. we run full back daily to two MSDPs but we have difficulty to duplicate to tapes with even ten drives. we are getting less than 40MB/sec from duplication. does anyone have better options for our situation?

We ever thought about use Veritas Appliance to hold local second copy and duplicate to tapes weekly, also thought about to dump the second copy to cloud. 

with the granular on, looks we couldn't use accelerator feature. our local dedu pools always are tight on space too.

Please share your experience. thanks in advance.

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X2
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Looking at my backup infrastructure, I see the last job from a DataDomain (deduplicated data) to tape (LTO-7 on SAN) write 840 GB in 1h15. This amounts to around 190 MB/s. So higher speeds are possible, it depends on your infrastructure.

Give more details about your infrastructure (hardware/software/connection type and speed rating) for the experts to send in suggestion on how to improve the throughput.

 

Nicolai
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With a size of 280 TiB a full restore will be measured in days not hours.

I would recommend doing disk snapshot on daily basis, and maybe a weekly traditional backup in case the datacenter disappears.

that said, X2 got a point. If tape drives run with 40MB/sec you have a bottleneck somewhere. 

Something you can test easily: Try running first with 1 tape drive, measure speed, then two drives, and then 3 drives etc. When does combined write speed drop ?

Best Regards
Nicolai

FlyMountain
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do you have granular enabled when you back up Exchange? We currently use two media servers, each one has local MSDP and four tape drives configured, backing up half database on each. four streams for backups, completed 10TB in 6~8 hours, then duplicate to the tapes with four streams, but duplication speed is slow, around 40~50MB/sec. 

MSDP is on SATA disk pool with 12 disks. we have to have granular enabled since we need to restore individual mailboxes.

All our Exchange servers on VMWare, i heard VM backup with granular support also can be used for backing VM and Exchange databases, any experience on this?

thanks.

An Exchange backup with granular restore enabled catalogs to the mailbox level. When you duplicate the image to tape, NetBackup extends the catalog by adding all the mailbox content. This takes some amount of time, because NetBackup has to bring up each database from the backup image. I think the catalog extension happens before NetBackup starts copying the data.

You can skip the granular catalog extension. It's an option on the duplication that's on by default.

Without the catalog extension, you have to duplicate the image back to disk before you can browse into the mailboxes.

Including Exchange in a VMware backup saves you data redundancy if you are also backing up the VM's. Unlike an MS-Windows policy, a VMware policy doesn't exclude the Exchange files. The granular browse and restore considerations are the same as for an Exchange policy.

With a VMware policy, you need to make sure Exchange discovery is working for you. With an Exchange policy, if the mailboxes aren't discovered ahead of time, they are enumerated during snapshot processing. A VMware backup doesn't enumerate the mailboxes if they haven't already been discovered.

A VMware policy only catalogs the Exchange databases and mailboxes for databases whose active copy is on the VM. That prevents redundancy when you are backing up multiple VMs that have copies of the database.

You can use Accelerator with a VMware backup that includes Exchange. Use Full schedules and let Accelerator handle the data reduction.