Yes, Each one of our Datacenters has it's own Gigabit backup highway. Every
one of our servers is multihomed with a production 10/100 NIC and a Gigbit
NIC for the backup highway.

Since each site backs up about a terabyte to 2 terabytes every 24 hours,
sending this across a production LAN is digital suicide.

Some important notes:
= All servers have two entries in DNS under "Server" and "Server-bk" where
each name points to the respective NIC ip.
= All servers have a persistent routes set up so that traffic destined for
the backup subnet is forced to use the backup NIC. 
= The improvement in data traffic and in backup speed was significant.  Some
backups went from 4-5 hours down to 30 mins.

While it can be costly upfront for the equipment, the savings that you gain
on the backend are very measureable especially if you are in a speed
sensitive environment.

=c=


-----Original Message-----
From: Carrington-West, Jim [mailto:jim.carrington-west AT sevenoaks.gov DOT uk]
Sent: Friday, September 12, 2003 4:05 AM
To: 'Veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu'
Subject: [Veritas-bu] Separate backup network?


Is anyone out there using Netbackup to backup servers across a separate
'backup network'?  Veritas have suggested that we should stick another
network card in each of our servers on a different subnet so as to separate
backup traffic from our existing LAN traffic.  I was wondeing if anyone else
had achieved/attempted this and whether it is worth doing.

Thanks,

Jim

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