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Upgrading Netbackup hardware. We have money to spend - any advice?

M_Hood
Level 3
Hi to all,

We currently have 1 x NB 6.5.4 (Win2003) Master Server with a SCSI attached Dell TLD containing 6 x LTO3 tape drives. Additionally we have 1 further media server (Win2003) which we use for disk backups (occasionally as it is extremely slow!). We also have 1 x NOM (Win2003) server and 1 x NB PureDisk 6.5.1.2 (PDOS) server which has 2TB of local disk space. 

 We have noticed that since we introduced multiple copy backups and all 6 Tape devices are in use, the NB platform slows to a halt. We are going to try and spread the load around a bit more. Our thinking is that we buy a media server for each of the 3 LAN's that have servers that we backup (SQL DB and File/Folder backups mainly). Each of these new media servers would either have a lot of local disk storage or would use DAS hardware. We are keen to get more out of our PureDisk software and are considering beefing that up and making it a clustered environment to an offsite device.

Quite simply, I have been asked to provide a design document and I wanted to ask if anyone had any reccomendations on how they think we should invest? Our largest backups are around 2TB and these happen on a weekly basis. We also send tapes offsite on a weekly basis for the critical backups so we are not keen on disk-only solutions. We are happy to upgrade to NB7.0 too if this has any relevance with regards to our forthcoming hardware purchase.

Any advice greatly appreciated.....

Martin
4 REPLIES 4

rjrumfelt
Level 6
I've alwasy been very partial to, and have seen great stats with Solaris hardware as master/media servers.  T5220's make for pretty good master and media servers.  I've yet to see one in my environment pegged out.

I would definately look at upgrading from a SCSI environment to fibre if you've got the budget to do so.  An SL500 library would be a good investment for a smaller environment, as when it is maxed out it only takes up 1 whole rack, and you can start out small with it and increase capacity as your environment grows.  Definately upgrade to LTO-4

Will_Restore
Level 6
Hire a good consultant.  :)

freddy49
Level 3
I agree with rjrumfelt move from the Windows platform to a Solaris or any Unix OS.  In addition move from DC SCSI to a fibre connection solution.  With a FC Soulution, you would be able to share the resorces between multiple media servers.  I recommend looking a Quantum i500 with LTO 4 Drives.  Another thought, is look to a VTL Virtual Tape Library. I know Quantum and EMC have a version of VTL.

Best of luck

rjrumfelt
Level 6
one of EMC's VTL's at my current location.  It seems to do pretty well.  If I had my choice for disk however, I would go with a dedup solution such as DataDomain.