Attila Mester wrote:

Hi Rick,

if you are looking for a Sparc Solaris based System, the T2000 could be a good choice. The M 4000-5000 serie seems to be over sized for this and probably too expensive. I have seen benchmark numbers with the T2000 being an excellent "Data Pump". When you set up the server being also a storagenode with B2D caching in AFTDs, you can easily feed 4 LTO3 drives, assuming the disks can handle this load. The tests I know about were done with a 6-core 8GB RAM T2000.

In the very informal testing we have run the T2000 can indeed run 4 LTO-3 tape drives around 120MB/sec/drive if the data resides on SAN (compressible data). If your data is highly compressible and on the network then you need to have the network bandwidth to push 480MB/sec or so.

The T2000 has only 4x 1GbE interfaces on board, this would be a limiting factor here. Six cores seemed more than adequate for CPU use! However if you are going to be using a lot of

multiplexing then 8GB of memory may not be enough.

If you need more than 300-400 MB/s network data collected from clients, you can consider the 10GbE

card which gives you more throughput.

The above test was made with NetBackup, but I´m confident, NetWorker would produce similar results.

regards  -attila

********************************************************************
Attila Mester                           5 Digit Sun internal: x62534
Data Protection Architect                  Tel: (+49 89) 46 008 2534
Sun Microsystems GmbH                      Fax: (+49 89) 46 008 2583
Sonnenallee 1                                Mobil: +49 172 812 5947
85551 Heimstetten / Germany              mail: attila.mester AT sun DOT com
********************************************************************




rick pim schrieb:

our main networker server is a sun v490 (4x1500 MHz CPU, 32 GB)
direct-connected via fiber to 3 LTO-3 drives in an L8500 library.
our current tape footprint is probably in the 20-30 TB range
but we're expecting some growth.

this server has more or less performed adequately, but it has two
limitations:

 - PCI bus only
 - only two network interfaces

we're in the position that a data center network redesign is going
to require at least three network interfaces, so we're going to replace
the server rather than just trying to wedge another network card into
an already-too-small-bus.

we're a sun shop with almost exclusively sparc hardware so we'd like
to stick with that. with this constraint, two obvious upgrade paths
are:
  - one of the coolthreads servers, t2000, t5220 or similar
  - one of the other "midrange" servers -- sun's M series or equivalent

does anyone have experiences, horror stories, warnings or
recommendations that they'd be willing to share?

rp

rick pim                                           rick AT post.queensu DOT ca
information technology services                          (613) 533-2242

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