NBU Operational and Best Practices Questions

[Spartacus81]

Friends,

Involved in few tasks and got couple of questions around storage servers, Tunning NBU etc and i was wondering if someone can share his/her experience.

One of my customers have got 5 storage servers that needs to be deleted but they have data sitting on them? is there anything else that needs to be done apart from duplicating the images to another storage server or tape to avoid any data loss.. 

Also, what are the best practices to increase the deduplication rate? 

One of my customers has asked me to conduct a healthcheck and they have a precise backup window and they want us to backup more data to the tapes without increasing the time window.. what should be the best appraoch and where should i look to start things (logs, elapsed times, no of files etc) any starting point?

[sri_vani]

1)One of my customers have got 5 storage servers that needs to be deleted but they have data sitting on them? is there anything else that needs to be done apart from duplicating the images to another storage server or tape to avoid any data loss..

Theres no other way other than duplicatiing...

2)the best practices to increase the deduplication rate?few suggestions:

Try to use the same storage server and volumes for the same type of the data.

eg:all file system to the same volume,all databases to the same volume.

Try to minimise the no of volumes in the deduplication device.

dont run data cleaning(garbage collection) more frequently.

3)It should be from the elapsed time and the amount of the data size and no of resorces utilized(like tape drives,media servers)

[Marianne]

Please tell us more about your 'storage servers'? 
What kind of storage server? a third-party OST storage device perhaps? 

If a 'storage server' in your environment is a media server, you can use nbdecommission. 
See http://www.symantec.com/docs/HOWTO66666

About Performance Tuning - this is no easy task and starts with identifying the bottleneck.
This can be read speed from disk on the client, network or underpowered media server.

You can find ways to test these components in NBU Planning and Performance Tuning Guide:  http://www.symantec.com/docs/DOC4483

You should be comfortable with methods described in this doc before agreeing to perform a health check and performance tuning for a customer.

More Performance Tuning docs:

Overview of NetBackup performance testing.
http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH147296

About tuning Windows for NetBackup 
http://www.symantec.com/docs/HOWTO56210

Key performance considerations for NetBackup 7.5 master servers 
http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH202840

Designing your backup system 
http://www.symantec.com/docs/HOWTO56078

Storage Unit Group performance considerations 
http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH64845

Please clarify this question?

Also, what are the best practices to increase the deduplication rate? 

Did you mean deduplication? Or duplication?

Deduplication rate is all about duplicate vs unique data on the clients and type of data on clients.
Media files (images, videos, music) will not dedupe well. High change rate of data on clients will cause bad dedupe rates. Nothing can be done from NBU point of view. These clients are simply not good candidates for dedupe.
 

[Spartacus81]

Thanks Siri and Marrianne.

Storage servers are normal media servers (MSDPs) and yes i meant de-deduplication. 

I will try and use nbdecommission and let NBU to deal with existing images to new storage servers instead of me manually duplicating it. 

also, how does policy level compression and encryption effect the dedup rate? I guess if we are backing up to dedup storage unit we dont really need policy level compression and encryption do we?

[Marianne]

You will get poor or no deduplication with encryption and/or compression enabled in NBU policy.

You should rather enable it at MSDP-level.

See http://www.symantec.com/docs/HOWTO36407

[Spartacus81]

Thanks Marrianne.