Re: [Veritas-bu] New Installation: 6.0 MP4 or 6.5 MPx ?

Hey Jeff

It all depends on what type of uptime you need in your environment.

But let me clarify something first, our upgrade from 5.x to 6.0MP4 went without any problems. We are not using any added functionality (except for online catalog backups).

Now what I mean from uptime is , in our environment we run jobs 24 by 7. At any given time there can be a little as 10 jobs running and as many as 200 jobs running. It all depends on various load factors.

A lot of our issue that we are still currently running into seem to have it roots based on load factors.within the framework of netbackup itself. Not common things like network bandwith, server kernel resources, tape/SAN resources but more internal Netbackup code defects and design considerations.

I just meet a fellow last week that is also running 6.0 mp4 and seems happy with it, (but he also would see backups terminate with no real cause but in his environment this seem to be acceptable.) This type of behavior is one of the many problems that get us a phone call from ops and 2am in the morning.

In our case if I had to do it over again we would have gone straight to 6.5 but when we started our testing 6.5 had just been released and we dont like to be the new kid on the block.

Now 6.5 is up to 6.5.1 and we are at the point that we really have no choice but to move forward to try to return to some sort of stability (we hope).

Hopefully this will give you some more insight on which choice is the best one for your current needs.

Sean

On Dec 18, 2007 11:03 PM, Jeff Cleverley <jeff.cleverley AT avagotech DOT com> wrote:

Greetings,

I'm coming into an unique opportunity with regards to NetBackup. I'm
going to get to start from scratch. No upgrades, imports, migrations,
etc. This environment is currently running NB5.0 and I also manage a
5.1 backing up 70 TB of SAN storage. We want to stay with NetBackup and
not switch to another vendor.

The old environment we inherited is old (hardware and software), been
managed by at least 4 different groups of administrators and
transitioned between at least 2 companies. We know the database is not
clean. We've decided we are going to set up everything new and when
everything on the old one expires, we're going to just shut it all off :-)

I've seen a number of threads about which versions to go to (6.0 MP4 vs
6.5 seemed the most common). Almost all of these dealt with upgrades.
I don't want to start any of the which is better threads but would like
to see what people would choose if they had the start from scratch
option. From what I'm seeing, I'm leaning towards 6.0 MP4.

Below is what we are going to be using and backing up:

Master server - Dell 2950 RHEL4 (final details like release level still
pending).
Current SAN media servers - hpux 11.00 (L3000 x 2) and 1 hpux 11.11
(rp3440), all fibre attached to the tape library.
Network clients - 1 RH3 client.
Tape library - Dell MS6000 with 4 fibre Gen 3 Ultrium drives.
SAN switches - Brocade 4100 x 2 ( We will also run the EMC SAN
connections through the switches).

The plan is to start replacing the hpux servers with Dell servers. They
will also do SAN backups. Everything else listed above will be new.
There will be ~ 20 TB of SAN based data on the 4 servers. Licensing may
be an issue as it seems to have changed. We currently have tier 1 hpux
licenses for the master and SAN media servers, along with some unix
network client licenses. We're trying to figure out the tier changes
but I can't get my hands on a licensing guide. We have enough drive and
SSO licenses for the new library.

We don't do any database backups like Oracle, no Windows at all, no
vaulting or remote replication, and don't currently have any reporting
software like Aptare to deal with the latest revisions. It sounds so
easy and simple it scares me :-)

Thanks,

Jeff

--

Jeff Cleverley
Unix Systems Administrator
4380 Ziegler Road
Fort Collins, Colorado 80525
970-288-4611
jeff.cleverley AT avagotech DOT com

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