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

Can I throw another thing out there...  On top of agreeing with all of those
issues, you may run into heat issues with the blade which can lower your
overall MTBF on the blade center.  Remember backup servers run hot all night
long, and then can be cloning all day long, that's a lot of extra heat.
 Also you have shared backplanes inside of a blade chassis, which means
you'll be sucking all that shared aggregate bandwidth out of the chassis.

Lastly, no sharing the VTL and real tape devices on a single HBA is not
recommended and in some cases not supported.  EMC for one would not do the
PS work for us on the EDL if we had the SL500 on the same HBA ports.  Keep
in mind you can easily max out an HBA's overall bandwidth with just a few
LTO or EDL drives...

But as others have stated there is always a reason... if this is a remote
site with only a single rack and all you have in the rack is a blade center,
fiber switch, router/switch, disk library and tape library, then yeah
sticking the NetWorker server in the bladecenter makes perfect sense until
you need additional capacity.

Alec

On Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 8:04 PM, Brian Narkinsky <bnarkinsky AT gmail DOT 
com>wrote:

> 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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