Hello,
It appears that your environment is on a smaller size, most of your
backups are done within 1.5 hr, the largest clients are not that large,
VTL will help you retain the DATA onsite and provide you speedy restores,
so will AFD, however, there is management and upkeep with both solution,
if you prefer staging, AFD might work well for you, if you like to keep
the clone around for longer time, VTL capacity\dedup etc would help you,
hardware\maintenance cost on VTL may make AFD more attractive, unless you
get a real good deal on your VTL.
Here are some points to help you achieve more from your existing
environment and some suggestions if you chose to do so.
1. Upgrade your primary backup server hardware. ( you said this is your
plan).
2. Attach Primary backup server with dual teamed NIC at GB Speed to your
backup Network.
3. Enable Jumbo Frames whenever possible, after vigorous testing in your
environment, this will result in lower CPU cycles on backup clients and
enhanced throughput.
4.Attach all possible clients that you can with GB NIC's ( enable Jumbo
Frames where appropriate).
5. When you build your New networker server, with upgraded hardware,
update OS to Windows 2003X 64 bit, Networker has 64 bit version ,which i
use quite a bit here and works well.
6. Upgrade to Networker 7.3.3 after your environment stabilizes, this has
some important fixes and will reduce problems with cloning, etc, i just
upgraded to 7.3.3 and it has reduced the errors quite a bit ( i went from
7.2.1).
7. Break up your largest clients into multiple savesets, wherever
possible, archive data when possible, use Dedicated storage node for your
largest client if the backups continue to be problematic over the network.
Carefully, plan your Device\Pools and parallelism to achieve max from
Networker and reduce multiplexing to minimum tolerable for your devices,
you should not worry too much about restore as with the improvements that
you will achieve as above, your restores will also benefit.
HTH
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