performance on Netbackup 6.5.4

[ITBOY]

Gentlemen,
I have problem to backup my data within the specified period.In fact ,I have about 6TB full data to run netbackup job every week. But according to our calcuation, it will take more 33 hours which is more than 24 hours ( 1 day ) . We are to backup via the dedicated 1Gbps ethernet link huge amount of data everyday.
In order to maximize the perfomance of netbackup ,which of the following ways is the best option to do ? ( Which one is the bottle neck of the performace ?)
( 1 ) Increase the size of Memory of the backup server ? ( Provided that memory slots are available )
( 2 ) Increase the CPU speed of the backup server?
( 3 ) Backup over the FC ( fibre channel ) link instead of gibabit ethernet ? ( in that case , which would be running the speed of the gibabit ethernet , 1Gbps , or only 80 % of 1 Gbps ?)
( 4 ) Increase the number of backup tape drives in the tape library?
( 5 ) Segregate the amount of data to backup and run the backup job concurrently?
        Is there any way to compute the backup window time frame ?
Thx.

[rjrumfelt]

If the bottleneck is your network, then increasing hardware (adding drives, cpu, or memory) will not have much of an affect, nor will segregating the data.  If the botteneck is network, then I would suggest utilizing FC.

[ITBOY]

Hi,
Thx for your kind reply. The problem is how do I know the bottle neck is in network or in server?

[Kenneth_Redler]

There are several specifics to a configuration you have not mentioned which affect performance:

1. Speed at which data is delivered to the media server / How fast can the clients deliver data to the media server. (often limited by client disk speed)
2. Speed at which tape drives can ingest data / What is bandwidth of tape drives individually and collectively. (what method are you using to write to tape over ethernet?)
3. Influence of other (Non-Netbackup) I/O intesive work on the Media Server
4. Network configuration/congestion - Is this really a dedicated (direct) 1Gbps ethernet link or is it through a network of shared switches.
5. Netbackup configuration - Are you using multiplexing?

Basically, you have to specify details of your configuration in order allow hypothesis on your bandwitdth restrictions.

[teiva-boy]

 There are some tweaks in the NBU tuning guide found on the support pages for download.  Mainly for network buffers...

You could trunk your Gb links on your media server for more bandwidth to receive more data in parallel.

Are you using jumbo frames on a dedicated backup network?  Perhaps think about it, since most servers have a 2nd NIC not in use in 75% of the customers I run into.

[Nathan_B]

That is a goodly amount of data, how many files is it roughly?  Netbackup doesn't like millions of files at all.

Have you considered going with Synthetic backups?

[Karthikeyan_Sun]

Flash backup can do magic in backing up files more in count check the admin guide to know about it

[Mike_Gavrilov]

It's a separate solutions but you can performe all of them together:
1. Create a trunk on Media server no increase LAN speed.
2. Use SAN-clients for backup (it's a better solution)
3. Use DSSU to perform a bakcup during weekend and after that you can relocate this images to tape.
4. If you using LTO3  upgrade up to LTO4.
6. If you using 1G insure that you enable jumbo-frames.

[ITBOY]

Hi Teiva-boy,
Thx for your reply. I have dowloaded the NBU tunning guide for 6.5.4 but still cannot find out how to trunk Gb links on my media server? Right Now, I'm using the  Sun Fire X4150 which has 4 NIC ports with 1Gbps enabled. But those are configured with different VLAN subnets ( etc, one port is MGMT VLAN and another port for Operation VLAN ). Could it be possible for trunking of those different VLAN NIC ports.
Pls.advise. Thx.

[Mike_Gavrilov]

Could it be possible for trunking of those different VLAN NIC ports
No it's not possible. Create several trunks each in it's own VLAN.

[ITBOY]

Hi Gavrilov,
Thx. As far as I know there is no specific trunking software for Redhat linux . I understood SUN has sun trunking software only for their Solaris 8,9 and 10 eventhough I want to crate trunking on one VLAN environment.Pls.correct me if i'm wrong.
Thx.

[Mike_Gavrilov]

On every OS you can create trunk over only one VLAN. On Solaris you can use Sun Trunk or aggregate links. On RHEL AFAIK you also have any tools for load balance of incoming traffic.

[Mike_Gavrilov]

You wrote Sun Fire X4150 which has 4 NIC ports with 1Gbps enabled. But those are configured with different VLAN subnets ( etc, one port is MGMT VLAN)
But this server has a dadicated network managmet port and you shouldn't  loose one NIC for managment 

[ITBOY]

Hi,
Thx and  appreciate your advise. Since I have atleast 3 VLANs connected to 3 diff NICs ( altogether is 4 NICs ). I don't think i can trunk different vlans to one trunk ports. Thanks.

[ITBOY]

Hi Gavrilov,
Thx. In fact 3 NICs has 3 VLANs. ( MGT VLAN, Operation VLAN and Backup VLAN , etc ).

[ITBOY]

Hi Nathan,
Thx for kind reply.Sorry for my late reply. I'm trying simulate the real environment.. Hve setup the 2 SVr , one for NBU Master and one NBU client . Each has 1 TB of Disk space mounted to one ISCSI SAN storage. When I try to backup the files ( 3 GB x 300 ) in the client to the  SVR NBU , the speed is quite disappointing. ( About 6 Hrs ).  But the production, about 5 TB of FULL backup has to be done. within 24 HRs.
SAN is connected to both svrs with 1 Gbps ethernet link.

[Anton_Panyushki]

According to my observation Gigabit Ether net trunking is not an option for backup. We tentatively installed this configuration on one of our Oracle DB clients, but that didn't helped to boost the backup performance.
I think the better solution is to :
a) convert your client to SAN media server
b) use 3-4 LTO3 or, better, LTO4 drives to backup this SAN media server.

Please don't forget to tweak NetBackup buffers on that SAN media server.
I presume you are already familiar with NetBackup Tuning Guide.

[Mike_Gavrilov]

Please tell me how you tried to do it (OS, trunk version, iopolicy) and why you decide that this doesn't work.

[ITBOY]

Hi Gavrilov,
Sorry for late reply. My reponse is below.
1 . I have the limitation on switch ports. But haven't tried yet.  Pls.advise any of solution to configure the trunk port on my Redhat Ent 5.
              http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/howto-configure-linux-virtual-local-area-network-vlan.html
              http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7268

2 .According to the approved design, the backup to be done only on ethernet interface due to ORACLE ARMAN .
3. In order to use the DSSU , we may need the  some storage space but we have tight space on the  SAN to store the image.
4. We'are planning to use the LTO4 drive.
5. I have setup the  jambo-frames but the performance is that significant yet.

            Right now, I am tesing the netbackup performance in  the development environment . Previously , I used the  linksys switch to connect to the SAN interface of the server. ( I'm using ISCSI in my development , eth0 is connected to backup LAN and eth2 is connected to the SAN on each  master NBU server and  netbackup client server. ) I have recently used the cisco switch and set the  jambo-frames in both NIC in the server and Cisco switch . But the performance on 100 GB data is not that significant without/ with  using jambo-frames as well as Linksys switch and Cisco Switch. But the data is 3 GB x 33 nos of binary files , But I noticed that netbackup transformed those 33x 3GB binary files to about 100 GB tar file. I believe it take some time to transform these files to one single 100 GB file but  there is  no bottle neck in the  network. Should i upgrade RAM?

[ITBOY]

Hi,
Thanks for your kind  advise. According to the approved design, we are limited to use the ethernet backup only and definitely we will use the  LTO4drive. but right  now I m testing the performance of the NBU on D2D using the jambo-frames but the performance is not that significantly improved yet.
I still need to go through all steps of performance tunning guide.
Thx.