Solaris to Windows Migration

[Mark_Newall]

Hello All,

We currently run NetBackup 6.5 on Solaris, on Sun hardware, and achieve very good performance. However, our organisation is considering moving away from Solaris so I'm investigating what hardware I'll need to achieve the same performance under Windows.

Currently, acting as our Master/Media server, is a Sun X4540. This provides ~30TB or RAID5 (raidz in ZFS speak) of disk staging space. Connected to this, via an FC SAN, is an Sun SL500 tape library with two LTO4 drives. The network connection takes the form or two bonded 1Gb links with scope to add two more. We also have an X4500 acting as a Media server which has another SL500 with two LTO4 drives attached via FC SAN. This also has the same network links.

We merrily flattern the two 2Gb links to these servers when backing up clients to the DSSUs with plenty of CPU headroom left to play with. We then destage to at an average of 400MB/s per server (i.e. 200MB/s to each tape drive giving an average aggregate throughput of 800MB/s) peaking at over 500MB/s. So our DSSUs are comfortably coping with ~200MB/s write speed and ~500MB/s read speed.

I would be very grateful to hear what configurations are being employed when running NetBackup on Windows to achieve similar or better performance.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Regards,

Mark

[Yasuhisa_Ishika]

Sun x4540 is designed with unique concept, intended for high performance disk I/O with conbination of many SCSI controllers and ZFS. It is hard for commodity server's internal RAID to compete with x4540. RAID 1(or 1+0) consist with two or more midrange external storages will be needed, I guess. It is better to consult with hardware vendors what configuration you can get 500MB/s read performance with on windows.