Question about SAN & VLS utilization.

[Samuel_Ayoub]

We are putting in an HP SAN with an HP 6870 Virtual Library System.  We currently have a Master/Media and a Media Netbackup 6.0 server direct attached to a STK SL500 w/ (4) SCSi LTO2 drives and 140 slots.  We have been trying to get design options, but the feedback from the hardware and software suppliers have been somewhat limited. 

We were thinking about the following:

- carving the VLS into 6 drives w/ 80+ LTO3 tapes.

- replace out (4) SCSI LTO2 drives w/ (6) Fiber LTO3 drives. 

- FC Attaching the Master/Media and Media server to (3) VLS drives and (3) STK drives a piece.  All backups to VLS and then to tape for off-site. 

or

- Putting the STK SL500 on the SAN with the VLS and sharing both devices amongst both media servers.  With this we would incur the SSO license costs.  

One of the vendors  mentioned an additional "Capacity" Symantec license required when using the VLS.  Has anyone heard of this? 

Any suggestions or refrences to good reading material would be appreciated.

[CY]

I don't know about HP's VLS product, but we use EMC's CDL here, which is a disk-based virtual tape library.  So I believe we are at the similar situation.

So far as I know, since the virtual tape library emulates itself as a real tape library (such as STK SL500, or ADIC Scalar i500), there would be no difference from NetBackup's perspective.

The only thing you need to check is make sure NetBackup supports the real tape Library that HP VLS can emulate.  For example, EMC CDL can emulate STK SL500 just fine and that's what I would suggest to use.

So for your proposal:

- carving the VLS into 6 drives w/ 80+ LTO3 tapes. (Yes you should be able to do that, unless HP says no)

- replace out (4) SCSI LTO2 drives w/ (6) Fiber LTO3 drives.  (that's a good thing)

- FC Attaching the Master/Media and Media server to (3) VLS drives and (3) STK drives a piece.  (that's definitely the way to go)

All backups to VLS (that's good since backups are written to disk - faster than tape, and less worn out for tape drives due to waiting for slow client's data)

and then to tape for off-site (that's good since you duplicate backup from disk to tape - it's more streamlined - we use that here too)

or

- Putting the STK SL500 on the SAN with the VLS and sharing both devices amongst both media servers.  With this we would incur the SSO license costs.  ( I would suggest you to get drives dedicated to each media server first, and configure SSO later when your environment is stable.   For example, 3 drives configured on Server_A, and the other 3 drives configured on Server_B, without sharing to each other.  That way you won't spend a lot of time troubleshooting and don't know where is the problem - is it SSO, or hardware, or network bandwidth, or host configuration, etc.)

[Samuel_Ayoub]

Thanks for the feedback.   Here is another thing I am curious about....  We will have Oracle servers SAN attached, so my question is when backing them up is there a way to do it without sending the data back over the LAN.  Is there anyway to setup a backup from the Client to the VLS directly so that data never has to leave the SAN?  I heard of the SAN copy or Snapshot option, but this doesn't hold any records in Netbackup or RMAN.

[CY]

Well, Samual, you have couple choices for the Oracle server backup:

1. Build that Oracle server as a NetBakcup SAN Media server, i.e, the server will see SAN tape drives so can back up its own disks without going through LAN to another NetBackup Media server.  The draw back is this will use the Oracle server's resource (CPU cycles, memory, and disk I/O.)  Also, you will more likely to use SSO in this case since you don't want to dedicate some tape drives to the Oracle server.

2. I assume you use HP's products - so do you have Business Copy license on your HP/Hitachi XP storage arrays?  If so, you can have the copy (secondary volumes) unmount from Oracle server, and import/mount on a NetBackup Media server to back.  All the data would trasfer on SAN only.  Check with your HP CE and he shall let you know more details.  

If what you have is HP EVA, I think it has snapshot function and probably can do something similar to the Business Copy.

[Liew_WK]

Hi Samuel,
Any VTL or VLS is license by TB, so if you add 5 TB to VLS/VTL in your storage domain then you need to pruchase 5TB licenses from SYMANTEC.

For VLS/VTL will not charge by drive/SSO/VAULT licenses but it does limit by OS SCSI LUN limitation per FC port (e.g. SUN & HPUX only detect 8 dev per FC port), so plan you drive creation on FC properly for performance purpose.
e.g.
create
R1 on FC0 - map lun to mediasvr 1,2,3
R2 on FC1 - map lun to mediasvr 4,5,6
R3 on FC2 - map lun to mediasvr 7,8,9
R4 on FC3 - map lun to mediasvr 10,11,12

I am doing some multipath in current project
FC0 & 1 - R1 - map to all
FC2 & 3 - R2 - map to all
and monitor performance at SAN switches, hope it will auto balance but no luck so far.

Try not to create too many robot as the mediasvr frow STU number grow and in my example... total 400++ STG now.

liewwk

[Anton_Panyushki]

The problem with HP VLS is that it can't emulate any physical tape library in NetBackup envoronment. The only emulation option is  HP VLS itself and this kind of emulation was specially added for NetBackup. So I suppose there are certain limitation that are imposed on this emulation.

[Stumpr2]

It's been a couple of months...any updates?

[Samuel_Ayoub]

We are implementing next week, we are still working out the kinks.  Once we get this all figured out, I'll repost

[Anton_Panyushki]

You know we tried out HP VLS 6XXX (maiden name Sepaton) and HDS ProtecTier and as for me ProtecTier beats HP VLS 6XXX. ProtecTier can do an online deduplication and HP have not adopted this useful feature from Sepaton.