Forum Discussion

psp_veritas's avatar
psp_veritas
Level 2
7 years ago

NetBackup Appliance MSDP Supported Capacity

Hi All, Deciding about selecting appliance or staying on open server for media server.  I am going for v8.0. From the appliance guide, I am curious that why MSDP supported to be growing upto 64TB, ...
  • Marianne's avatar
    Marianne
    7 years ago

    We have asked our local Veritas SE the same question.

    His answer was:

    With 'Build your own' there are too many variables outside Veritas's control - such as these characteristics of an appliance: optimized OS, hardware components, the Veritas Volume manager and filesystem and the fact that a NBU admin does not need any knowledge of the Volume Manager in order to grow or shrink volume layouts.
    There were more reasons mentioned that I cannot remember now...

    I agree with Mouse - ask your local SE to put you in contact with PM.

  • josef_honc1's avatar
    josef_honc1
    7 years ago

    You can purchase InfoScale Foundation and use VxFS to overcome that limit, but still you will be running an unsupported solution. The probability that you will face issues with this configuration is quite high and run an unsupported environment is too risky.

    Regards

    Josef

  • Mouse's avatar
    Mouse
    7 years ago

    You can't span mountpoints and MSDP don't support multiple volumes unlike some other OST and notably used to support PureDisk (RIP). But yes, you can mimic 95% of software configuration of the appliances using COTS components but what you will be missing still is a formal supportability of the solution

    I can tell you a story from my experience which goes back a few years, that time 5220s were new appliances and quality control was pretty horrible, so a customer of ours purchased a few boxes and we tried to get them running, after a few months and major RMA/replacements of various components we were able to bring them up only just to hear that the customer has lost confidence in the solution and wanted their money back. Fast forward one or two years after that, the customer need a solution to store data on disk and goes with BYO stuff from their server vendor. Everything is fine until they trying to write more than 7 streams to MSDP, the performance drops dramatically. Just removing MSDP out of picture and putting any random app from Oracle to NBU's Advanced Disk solves the issue immediately. Because the issue is not obvious, however the RAID controller was suspected, they could not RMA two large capacity / high performance servers with their vendor because with all other tests they were working fine. Who is at fault? Not clear. The customer was upset again.

    Fast forward two years to today, they decided to try a pair of 5330s and very happy.

    At the same time I know heaps of my other customers who run BYO MSDP and happy with them.

Marianne's avatar
Marianne
Level 6

We have asked our local Veritas SE the same question.

His answer was:

With 'Build your own' there are too many variables outside Veritas's control - such as these characteristics of an appliance: optimized OS, hardware components, the Veritas Volume manager and filesystem and the fact that a NBU admin does not need any knowledge of the Volume Manager in order to grow or shrink volume layouts.
There were more reasons mentioned that I cannot remember now...

I agree with Mouse - ask your local SE to put you in contact with PM.

psp_veritas's avatar
psp_veritas
Level 2
7 years ago

Hi Marianne,

Thanks a lot for your clarification.

I got the point. It seems that the limitation of OS' maximum filesystem size limit the space to keep data for Netbackup, then VxFS comes to play to overcome this limitation.

The only solution to make my HP server to achieve beyond beyond 64TB or 96TB space (if I don't spend more for VxFS) is to configure MSDP use space across more than one filesystem. (which I don't know if it is possible. I take a look into my old 7.6 system, MDSP is stored in one path, and don't know if it has option to add mountpoints, and let MSDP span the use of all of them, which I tried to find the way and found nothing). Or I miss something which could let possible to span across mountpoints?

 

  • Mouse's avatar
    Mouse
    Moderator
    7 years ago

    You can't span mountpoints and MSDP don't support multiple volumes unlike some other OST and notably used to support PureDisk (RIP). But yes, you can mimic 95% of software configuration of the appliances using COTS components but what you will be missing still is a formal supportability of the solution

    I can tell you a story from my experience which goes back a few years, that time 5220s were new appliances and quality control was pretty horrible, so a customer of ours purchased a few boxes and we tried to get them running, after a few months and major RMA/replacements of various components we were able to bring them up only just to hear that the customer has lost confidence in the solution and wanted their money back. Fast forward one or two years after that, the customer need a solution to store data on disk and goes with BYO stuff from their server vendor. Everything is fine until they trying to write more than 7 streams to MSDP, the performance drops dramatically. Just removing MSDP out of picture and putting any random app from Oracle to NBU's Advanced Disk solves the issue immediately. Because the issue is not obvious, however the RAID controller was suspected, they could not RMA two large capacity / high performance servers with their vendor because with all other tests they were working fine. Who is at fault? Not clear. The customer was upset again.

    Fast forward two years to today, they decided to try a pair of 5330s and very happy.

    At the same time I know heaps of my other customers who run BYO MSDP and happy with them.

  • Marianne's avatar
    Marianne
    Level 6
    7 years ago

    NetBackup Deduplication Guide   says the following:

    Up to 64 TBs of storage
    Provision the backup storage so that it appears as a single mount point to the operating system.
    Because the storage requires a directory path, do not use only the root node (/) or drive letter (E:\) as the storage path. (That is, do not mount the storage as a root node (/) or a drive letter (E:\).
    If you use a separate disk volume for the deduplication database, provision a 1-TB volume on a different mount point than the backup data storage.

    96-TBs of storage
    NetBackup supports 96 TBs of storage in a single Media Server Deduplication Pool on certain operating systems.
    See “About MSDP storage capacity” on page 17.
    Support requires four separate volumes on the storage server host.

    (More in the manual)

  • josef_honc1's avatar
    josef_honc1
    Level 3
    7 years ago

    You can purchase InfoScale Foundation and use VxFS to overcome that limit, but still you will be running an unsupported solution. The probability that you will face issues with this configuration is quite high and run an unsupported environment is too risky.

    Regards

    Josef

    • psp_veritas's avatar
      psp_veritas
      Level 2
      7 years ago

      Hi All,

      I have to go back and think about how to make use of what I have.

      I admit even I find the way to go beyond limitation, opening support cases should be considered if I run into troubles in the future.

      I also think about separate into two or more media servers, but I also need more SAN storage capacity to keep my backed up data. 

       

      Thank you for every recommendation.

      • Mouse's avatar
        Mouse
        Moderator
        7 years ago

        Since you've mentioned SAN for storing backups, just make sure you store backups on a separate SAN or DAS disks, just a few months ago we had our goverment agency to go out of business for several weeks because they stored parts of NBU on the same array as their production data, and the said array was completely destroyed.