John W. Stephens wrote:
>
> I have a question to anyone using ADSM in the NT environment.
> What kind of server hardware have you found adequate and what sort of
> peripheral tape drives are you using.
>
> How would you go about deciding on how much disk space to purchase for your
> disk pools and how are they configured.
>
> What sort of Tape library's do you use and how is the size/ speed ratio under
> ADSM.
>
> Any input would be much appreciated,
> I am trying to help decide what kind of equipment to run the ADSM NT version
> with and hope to get a jump start from anyone who may have went thru this
> already.
>
> Thanks,
>
> John Stephens
> 813-348-7601
Difficult question, there are too many variables.
We started out testing on an old P90 server with 8GB Storage (2 4GB
drives mirrored, only 4 GB usable)
and two DLT 4000 manual tape drives. As we added clients, we wrote
direct to tape, and monitored the results
to see what kind of storage we would need. This gave us a good feel of
how much data would be backed up
each night per server (We don't backup workstations, the users are
provided with storage on one of two
data servers connected to disk towers).
We then decided on a dual P200 Compaq Proliant 5000 with 16GB of RAID5
storage, and are getting very good performance. We adjusted our diskpool
sizes to store at least two nights incremental. (We allow more on
the servers that have the most restore request).
We have found that restores from the diskpool are almost instant, but
event when the files are on tape, most single file restores take less
than 5 minutes.
We are in the process of ordering an ATL, so we don't have any
experience here yet, but we will be using DLT 4000s the performance of
our manual drives has been excelent.
Note: Our old system involved each server doing its own full backup on
an internal tape drives, mostly 4MM, some 8MM, and three DLT 2000s. The
performance and reliability of the DLT 2000s led us the purchase the DLT
4000s for the new system.
The documentation has some rule of thumb guidelines for determining
storage needs, but we found that the only good way is to test. Each
server is fairly consistent in the amount of data backed up each night,
the amount of compression, and the transfer rate, but these numbers vary
widely between servers. There is no norm or average that we can apply.
The best suggestion that I can give you is to make sure that whatever
you buy, leave plenty of room for expansion.
Currently we are running backups on 13 servers and are still converting.
These include application, database, imaging, and file storage servers.
Each has its own unique set of performance stats.
|
