On Wed, Feb 01, 2006 at 11:18:27AM -0000, Justin Durrant wrote:
> > How many client machines are you backing up?
> Over 300 hundred boxes. Most of them are on site locally but there was
> mention that perhaps we should be backing up our various remote sites.
> However, our Windows admin has suggested that we could possibly use DFS for
> this; so this may be the route we take on remote sites.

Our remote sites use a variety of solutions.  Ideally, you would make a
server at the remote site a media server and hang a tape drive off of
it.  The catalog would still be on your master.  We haven't had
approvals to implement this yet so we're using a couple of different
approaches - BackupExec with local tape drives, or storage replication
back to our central offices.

> > Are they a variety of operating systems? (ie: Unix, NT, 2003)
> We have a selection. We're only backing up servers (Solaris, RHEL and
> Windows), a NetApp filer and our SAN.
> I'd like to be able to backup the SAN data directly; it is currently being
> backed up via the machine that uses the space but I'm sure that this is the
> wrong way to do it.

This isn't the wrong way.  Think of the SAN as just an expensive RAID
controller.  If you want to bypass the file system in any way, you're
not going to be able to restore individual files.  There are various
approaches to backing up SAN-connected hosts faster than a traditional
host-based backup (SAN media server, off-host backup) but you're still
going to be talking to the client that is using the storage.  You can
also minimize the impact on the client by using snapshotting
technologies, whether it's on the SAN or at the host level.

> > In terms of what you backup, you may be able to find this out from the
> > "Images on Media" report tool - most of the information about the clients
> > and size of data on tape can come from the Reports applet.
> Thankyou, I'll take a look at these reports.

There are various commercial NetBackup reporting products that can help
you do capacity plannning.  We use Aptare's StorageConsole.  With
NetBackup 6.0, there's NetBackup Operations Manager that gives you a
subset of that functionality.  There are other products out there too.
You can write scripts that generate reports for you on the master
server, but if you're the only person only somewhat supporting an
environment with over 300 clients, you're probably not going to have
time for this.

> > Netbackup is scalable, there is no doubt about that - In my own personal
> > view, some of the add-on's appear to be very expensive (ie SQL license,
> > Oracle) so you need to take costs into account.
> Phew, that kinda answers part of the issue. Not sure about add-on's that
> we'd require. I havent heard mention of costs yet so I wont be losing any
> sleep over this.

We have half the number of clients you do, but we have a lot of storage
tied to our clients - our SAN alone is about 150TB and growing
exponentially.  We're using a combination of normal filesystem backups
and SQL agents, Oracle agents, Exchange agents, and flash backups.  We
hope to add Bare Metal Restore functionality later this year.

> > Not sure if I am being much help here ? :-(
> Any help is more than I had to start with. Thanks muchly

If you've got specific questions, just holler.

There are consulting companies out there that can help with NetBackup
capacity planning and tuning (for a fee of course).  We had Datalink
come in last year to help us evaluate our environment.  They didn't find
much but it made management feel better that we were doing our jobs.

        .../Ed

-- 
Ed Wilts, Mounds View, MN, USA
mailto:ewilts AT ewilts DOT org