Re: [Networker] Anyone using bladeservers for networker with a VTL?

I agree.  I have run Networker on Blades.  Most of my issues have been with
connectivity.  There are a lot of times you need to add a NIC to a seperate
VLAN or an HBA for an  unconnected SAN.  The ability to simply add an
additional HBA or NIC can make life easier.

My 2 cents.







On Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 8:54 PM, STANLEY R. HORWITZ <stan AT temple DOT edu> 
wrote:

> On Feb 10, 2010, at 8:44 PM, rmumford wrote:
>
> > We're considering moving our stand alone servers and storage nodes to
> bladecenter, but there's concerns around the limited number of HBAs you can
> have on a blade. There's also concerns about sharing them with other blades
> and having tape data mixed with disk data on the same HBAs. Anyone doing
> this now? If so how does it work, are there any issues etc? Thanks.
>
> In my moderately humble opinion, blades offer a lot of useful functionality
> in many situations, but I think it would be a mistake to run a NetWorker
> server off a blade. I have a NetWorker 7.4.4 server on a Dell 2950 with
> Linux. That 2950 is connected via four fiber links to a Qualstar tape
> library with four LTO-3 tape drives. It is a real workhorse, but all its
> slots are full and I would like to add another network card to it. I
> couldn't imagine running a NetWorker server on a blade for exactly the
> reason you stated, limited number of expansion slots and I/O bandwidth on
> the shared blade HBAs. On the other hand, using a blade to run a storage
> node might be a different story depending on what the storage node needs to
> do and what type of backup storage needs to be connected to it.
>
> In your decision, try to set up a calculation of how much throughput you
> need in order to complete backups within your backup window, then look at
> the hardware capabilities of the blades you are considering and see if it is
> up to the task. If at all possible, do some real testing with a demo unit
> before you decide to move forward with a blade-based backup server.
>
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