Thanks Dave.  You sure have put in some pointers for me.  I'll investigate
these and experiment with the settings.  

-----Original Message-----
From: Legato NetWorker discussion [mailto:NETWORKER AT listserv.temple DOT edu] 
On
Behalf Of Fields, David
Sent: 11 May 2005 16:02
To: NETWORKER AT listserv.temple DOT edu
Subject: Re: [Networker] Tuning of Networker 7.1.2

As a couple of other people have replied, this can be tricky.  However, I
think it's definitely possible.  I only backup slightly more than 1 TB on
the night when we do our full backups, but the total time it takes me to do
that is definitely less than 8 hours, so you should be able to do this.

There are some things which can help:

Use a separate network for your backups if possible, either fibre channel or
gigabit.  If you're doing it over gig Ethernet, enable jumbo frames if
possible on all devices.  Test the speed of your network somehow to make
sure you're getting good throughput from all your clients to your NetWorker
server also.  This can help eliminate any network related issues.  Also,
this might affect the block size used on the tape drives.  

As someone else mentioned, make sure your parallelism is set high enough,
but be careful with this one cause you can shoot yourself in the foot.  This
depends on how your client servers have configured their disk space.  For
the maximum backup speed (and general server efficiency), not to put
multiple file systems on a single raid group because when Networker starts,
it will try to backup all of the file systems at the same time, and this can
be bad if they are all on the same physical disks.  You could end up taking
longer to do backups this way because of all the disk thrashing that's going
on.  

Make sure you're using your tape drives to their full capacity by adjusting
the number of sessions each tape drive will accept (note, many people get
confused and think that the number of sessions is the maximum number of
sessions that a tape drive will accept.  What this number actually means is
the number of sessions a device will accept before redirecting any new
sessions to other tapes drives in a "round robin" fashion).  Networker works
best in situations where it can constantly stream data to the tape drive.
This prevents having to stop the tape, rewind, reposition, and restart
writing process (this happens more than you would think with backup
programs).  Thierry Faidherbe has written an excellent tool, the Legato
Networker Reporting Utility (http://users.skynet.be/networker_reporter/),
which can help monitor this, and a whole bunch of other things (so much so
that I'm still trying to figure some of it out).

Hope this helps.

Dave




-----Original Message-----
From: Legato NetWorker discussion [mailto:NETWORKER AT LISTSERV.TEMPLE DOT EDU] 
On
Behalf Of Osay Osman Yuuni
Sent: Saturday, May 07, 2005 8:43 AM
To: NETWORKER AT LISTSERV.TEMPLE DOT EDU
Subject: [Networker] Tuning of Networker 7.1.2


We're running Networker 7.1.2 at our site with an ADIC Scalar i2000 with 4
LTO II drives.  We have DDS for the four drives and 7 storage nodes.  We
also have a particular requirement to send Full backups of our production
servers offsite daily.   I have therefore configured a Save Group for
Windows, one for HPUX and one for Linux.  The total amount of data backed up
is 1.5TB.  We have a backup windows of just 8 hours.  Normally the backups
should successfully complete in this window.  However I often have backups
running well into the next day.  I have grouped the Windows production
servers into the W2KFull save group which can be backed up by two dedicated
storage nodes.  The HPUX servers are also grouped together and can be backed
up by three dedicated storage nodes.  Some of the W2K server however need to
be backed up through the LAN on the Networker server which is also a
dedicated storage node.  Is there a way to improve the performance to have
all the data backed up in the 8 hour window?

Thank you.

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Note: To sign off this list, send a "signoff networker" command via email
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--
Note: To sign off this list, send a "signoff networker" command via email
to listserv AT listserv.temple DOT edu or visit the list's Web site at
http://listserv.temple.edu/archives/networker.html where you can
also view and post messages to the list. Questions regarding this list
should be sent to stan AT temple DOT edu
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