NetBackup 7.1 MSDP Disk Provisioning

[Sean_C_]

Hi,

I am about to start using dedupe in my environment and was wondering if anyone had any advice or best practices for disk provisioning? Basically I have a NetBackup Media Server (7.1) running on Windows 2003 SP2 which has 28 x 1TB SAS drives locally attached. Now I am not sure if I am better off creating one big RAID 6 volume or a number of smaller volumes for the disk pools. I have had bad experiences with Windows and big NTFS volumes in the past which has made me a bit cautious.

Thanks

[kleetuss14]

The MBR of an NTFS drive can only support 2 TB drives so you'll have to format the drive(s) as GPT (guid partition table) to get past this limit.

I have deployed a Windows 2003 server with a ~10TB drive presented via FC from an EMC CLARiiON. The server has since been upgraded to 2008 R2.

I use the entire LUN as a single GPT drive and have setup Media Server Deduplication Pool on it...it's about 75% full right now and appears to be working fine since Nov 2010.

[teiva-boy · Accepted solution]

Whatever you do, just make sure you can write faster than 200MB/s.  There is a technote on that somewhere...  Though I think it's a little less (around 150-180MB/s) I just rounded up for headroom.  

I would hope you can get that with at least 25 spindles going..  (assuming a hot spare, and two drives for parity)

Though I wonder what the rebuild times would be like in this case?  Would it be better to have dual controllers, create two smaller arrays and join them?  To negate long rebuild times?  

[Sean_C_]

Thanks for the input guys.

Having had a look at the NetBackup 5000 Appliances, they are effectively 24 x 1TB disks that are in a RAID 6 array with a hot spare, so I may take the approach of having one large GPT volume RAID 6 with a hot spare as well.

Just hope that Windows will be happy with this in the future.

Incase you were interested, I am using an HP MDS600 Disk Array.

[Marianne]

I think teiva-boy was referring to this TN:

http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH77575

NetBackup Deduplication: Additional Usage Information, version "F" (updated February, 2011)