Networker

Re: [Networker] Performance of NW 7.2.x on Solaris 8 or 9 or 10?

2007-04-04 15:11:44
Subject: Re: [Networker] Performance of NW 7.2.x on Solaris 8 or 9 or 10?
From: John Stoffel <john.stoffel AT TAEC.TOSHIBA DOT COM>
To: NETWORKER AT LISTSERV.TEMPLE DOT EDU
Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2007 15:04:24 -0400
>>>>> "Darren" == Darren Dunham <ddunham AT TAOS DOT COM> writes:

>> We're planning on upgrading an old E450 with Solaris 8 running NW
>> 7.2.x with a new V440, but we're debating which OS to run.  Most of
>> our remaining Sun boxes still run Solaris 8, it's been nice and stable
>> for years.  We do have some Solaris 9 boxes, and I seem to recall that
>> 9 made network and IO performance boosts over 8.  But it might be time
>> to dip our toes into the Solaris 10 waters.  
>> 
>> Our setup is a Netapp FAS960 with around 12Tb of data, backed up via
>> NFS currently, a Notes server, plus some other small misc boxes to
>> backup.   We've looked into NDMP backups in the past, but the limits
>> on restores being 10,240 files or less for Indexed backups really just
>> kills using NDMP for us.  

Darren> What's your filer OS?  I thought the limit was 1 million files
Darren> even back on 7.1?  Of course even 1M files may not be
Darren> sufficient for you, but it's a lot better than 10K.

We're running 7.0.3P3, but were thinking of going to 7.2.1.1 at some
point.

>From what I've been told and understand, if you setup NDMP with
indexing (DAR), then you cannot restore more than 10,240 files
individually at a time, which is a big hassle.  We have filesystems
with over a million files in them, and some with 5 million plus.  I
won't comment on the silliness of the applications doing this mind
you, but...

In any case, we've been told that the problem is that while NetApp can
only handle 10,240 files at a time, they can handle multiple restore
requests at a time, but that Networker doesn't handle it right.  

And who thinks EMC has an incentive to make Networker work better with
Netapp?

I'd love to be proven wrong here, it would make us re-think moving to
NDMP in a big way, if only for the performance boost.

John
    John Stoffel - Senior Staff Systems Administrator - System LSI Group
  Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. - http://www.toshiba.com/taec
             john.stoffel AT taec.toshiba DOT com - 508-486-1087

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