IMHO - This is one of Networkers weakest attributes, the "level-loading"
of backups so that all your backups have a increased chance of
completing within your desired backup window regardless of what night of
the week it is. I do this manually in our environment now because I have
no other choice. I've only worked with one product that did this
automatically and it was even from EMC (before they acquired Networker).
It was called EDM (which stood for Enterprise Data Manager). It was a
Solaris based backup server that only required you to specify how often
you wanted a client to have a full backup performed. It defaulted to 14
days, or once every two weeks. It would analyze the data load and
determine when full saves were to be done on each client so that all the
full saves were spread out over the 'rotation' period (normally 14
days). It worked pretty well, and they were supposed to implement that
'feature' into Networker eventually, but that has sadly not come to
pass. But maybe EMC still has plans to implement this, which would be
great !! Now I have to create multiple schedules to perform full saves
on different nights and assign these schedule to clients in such a way
so that the full saves are distributed enough so that everything
completes within our desired backup window as often as possible... It's
no easy task... 

-----Original Message-----
From: EMC NetWorker discussion [mailto:NETWORKER AT LISTSERV.TEMPLE DOT EDU] On
Behalf Of N.J.Tustain
Sent: Monday, August 02, 2010 9:17 AM
To: NETWORKER AT LISTSERV.TEMPLE DOT EDU
Subject: [Networker] Backup job scheduling

Does anyone use any kind of intelligent scheduling arrangement to
prioritise and control backup jobs?

Our operational people lump clients together in 'groups' test servers
with live servers then let them fight it out for available networker
resources. 
This is particularly bad over a weekend when most full backups get
scheduled. 

On occasions it all falls over there are questions asked of the backup
software or the architecture. 

The emphasis seems to be on saying the backup system isn't capable of
handling the load, as opposed to resolving the problem by better
management of backup jobs.


What are people's opinions on this? 


Is that Networkers ability to multiplex backup jobs, one of its benefits
lead to poor job scheduling ability? Does TSM or netbackup work in a
similar way?

Anyone else have problems with this?

Thanks
Nick 

  


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