What are the advantages of using Advanced Clients on Windows Clients?

[W_M_Wong]

Hi All,

I have a few Windows Clients backing up through LAN. These are file servers and lotus note servers.

What are the advantages I will have if I purchase and install Advanced Clients on these Windows Clients?

I have read about the features of Adanced Clients: Snapshot, FlashBackup, Instant Recovery, Offhost backup, Block level incremental backup (BLI). But I am more interested in the advantages in terms of speed of backup jobs.

Any comments are very much appreciated.

Thank you.

[Mark_Newall]

Hello,

FlashBackup will generally provided significant speed improvements over the traditional file ordered backup method; FlashBackup performs a block level backup. What throughput are you currently getting from the file server?

Regards,

Mark

[W_M_Wong]

i am getting 15MB/s (average) on the file servers.

[Tim_Rae]

NBU Advanced client advantages;

1. Offhost backup to a NBU Media Server for Exchange.

2. Point in time snapshots for instant recovery.

3. Backup file systems at bitmap or block level (FlashBackup).

4. Block level incremental backup (BLIB) for Oracle - Works in conjuction with VxFS.

5. Integration with hardware array snapshots via VSS.

6. Integration with NetApp CIFS snapshot.

[Mark_Newall]

You can expect that to increase to native speed of your tape drives x ~1.5 with compresssion
(assuming your file system isn't compressed already).

HP produce a number of useful tools for testing the various parts of your infrastructure;
these can be found at:

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareIndex.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&prod
NameId=238673&prodTypeId=12169&prodSeriesId=238671&swLang=8&taskId=135&swEnvOID=1005

HPReadData will test the rate at which the OS can read date in a file order method from the
attached disks. This is essentially the maximum backup speed you will ever achieve from the
client if you use just one data stream. This should give you around 15MB/s.

HPCreateData will do much the same but this time creating data. This is good for assessing
the likely restore speed.

HPTapePerf will test the performance of your tape drives. You can run multiple instances of
this tool directing each one at a different tape drive to make sure your SCSI/FC channel has
sufficient bandwidth and you are not overloading your PCI bus.

Regards,

Mark