Networker

Re: [Networker] SUN X4500 'Thumper' as a storage node?

2007-04-22 20:12:59
Subject: Re: [Networker] SUN X4500 'Thumper' as a storage node?
From: Tim Nicholson <tim AT MAIL.USYD.EDU DOT AU>
To: NETWORKER AT LISTSERV.TEMPLE DOT EDU
Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 10:10:46 +1000
Hi Eric,

Here at the University we have done so, or rather still in the process of
doing so.

We configured the disks using zfs (with mirrored pairs) as this is the
recommended configuration for speed.  We have allowed a couple of spares
and the system disks are also mirrored.  This gives a zfs pool of ~10TB.

We have been staging to disk for some years now on the backup server
which is a SUN V440 running Solaris 9 and NetWorker 7.3.2 Jumbo11
with ~3TB of disk, so our scripts for staging did not need much modifying.

This is our first and only (separate) storage node. We had some teething
problems with recovers because we use a mixture of LTO Ultrium 1 and
LTO Ultrium 2 drives.  [Gripe: Networker is not very clever about
choosing the storage node to request a tape for recovers, particularly
when you have drives connected to different storage nodes, but in the
same jukebox.]   [Gripe:  The Solaris storage node licence is
ridiculously expensive compared to a Linux one!]

So for our experience is good.

Currently we saturate the 1GB ethernet port configured while doing the
backups.  We are in the process of setting up an etherchannel to use
all 4 ethernet ports on the box (this requires us doing the same
further into the network).

At present we have only 2 LTO Ultrium 2 drives connected to the Thumper
(although two LTO Ultrium 3 drives are being commissioned as I write).
We can clone/stage to both of these full speed (35MB/s each) and still
only have the disks ~7% busy.

We use client side compression to reduce the network bandwidth,
amount of disk storage for adv_file devices and volume to be cloned.

I hope this helps.

Tim.


On 21/04/2007, at 3:24 AM, Eric Haupt wrote:

Is anyone using a SUN X4500 "Thumper" server as a storage node, backup to disk, staging server yet in their production environments with NetWorker? If so can you please share with the group your impressions and experiences?
There is an interesting article on this server's specs at
http://research.microsoft.com/~Gray/papers/JHU_thumper.doc. done by the JHU
Physics dept.
Thanks.
~ Eric

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