Hi Steve
In my experience, desktop workstations are not backed up; all important data
created on these workstations are written to and accessed from network file
shares hosted by file servers, most likely via CIFS or NFS. Only the file
servers holding your critical data are backed up. There shouldn't be any
important or unique information in these workstations. If a disk becomes
corrupted, the operating system can be re-installed or re-applied from a
Ghost image or other bare-metal recovery agent like NetWorker Recovery
Manager.
Mobile system are another story. You'd want to have a utility that would do
automated backups when the user connects to the network from their motel
room. Good laptop backup tools will compress the data stream, and even
backup only the blocks that have changed, instead of entire files. These
features make the most of the usually-small communications link, although
LAN connections in the better motel chains are becoming more common. If you
want to stay with a Legato product, check out NetWorker Laptop, which seems
to have these features.
I'd focus on figuring out how much data these 3,000 Windows clients will
generate, and size your file server disk capacity accordingly. Then, deploy
a storage-area network, attaching your file servers, storage arrays, and
tape drives to it. Create a SAN-based backup solution, and making sure you
have enough backup capacity to meet your needs. Consider using Serial ATA
and lower cost Fibre Channel disks for backups instead of tapes, and use
tapes only for archiving. With disks, you can do things that tapes can't do
(like snapshots, mirrors, clones and array-to-array copies). Backup vendors
are beginning to treat these storage entities (ex., snapshots) as a
different form of backups, joining the traditional saveset (backup
container) form of backup.
Great question! Hope this helps.
tl
Terry Lemons
CLARiiON Application Solutions Engineering
EMC²
where information lives
4400 Computer Drive, MS D239
Westboro MA 01580
Phone: 508 898 7312
Email: Lemons_Terry AT emc DOT com
-----Original Message-----
From: Steve Lee [mailto:lee AT SJU DOT EDU]
Sent: Thursday, October 24, 2002 10:41 AM
To: NETWORKER AT LISTMAIL.TEMPLE DOT EDU
Subject: [Networker] expansion plans
Hi. I have been using Networker to backup 20 Solaris clients for a few
years. We have one library, do a little manual cloning, a very vanilla
setup. I have been asked to plan for backing up 3,000 windows clients next
year. These are desktops and laptops running 98, 2000, XP.
Do I just order a JUMBO library, 3,000 client licenses and hope for the
best? Is anyone working in a similar environment willing to share
experiences? I'm comfortable with Networker and Solaris but if I need to go
to a different platform or a different software so be it.
I welcome all suggestions.
Regards,
Steve
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