It depends (I'm not fond of answers that begin that way...but it is
appropriate in this case).

Since NetBackup is "image" based and not "tape" based, it will only
duplicate those images that meet your criteria set our in your profile.
Secondly, if you use multiple drives (for increased performance through
parallelism) for your duplication, the likelihood of some tapes ending
up partially full is quite possible.  It seems that you are using 6
drives for your duplication to match the 6 media servers in your
environment.  You can maximize the usefulness of your media if you
reduce the number of source drives at your destination storage unit.
The trade-off here is the fact that you may not complete your
duplication within the same time-frame as you are currently
experiencing.  

The altreadhost function is nice since it doesn't burden your media
servers.  If it is slow then you may be experiencing an over-burdened
master server which for this scenario may respond to some performance
tuning (assuming your master is the altreadhost).  What it does is
temporarily create an assignment entry in the master server's mediaDB so
it can perform the reads/writes.  My advice would be to take it one step
at a time.  Address your vault issue, and then if necessary address your
master server "read/write" performance through tuning possibilities.

HTH

David A. Chapa * Technical Advisor, Technical Marketing * ADIC *
720.249.5836 * david.chapa AT adic DOT com

Pathlight VX - Integrated Disk-to-Tape Backup - http://www.adic.com


-----Original Message-----
From: Hart, Charles [mailto:charles.hart AT medtronic DOT com] 
Sent: Sunday, October 05, 2003 5:49 AM
To: veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
Cc: Blumenfeld, Jesse
Subject: [Veritas-bu] Netbackup Vault / Dupes in SAN SSO Env.

ENV
NBU 4.5 FP5 DC 
Master - Sun 480R 
6 x 9940B FC SAN Attached
6 Win2K SAN Media Mngs

Duplication Sanity Check ?

When we do a daily Duplication using Vault we are sending as many tapes
offsite as the old BackupExec env using DLT 35/70's which are 5-10x'
less capacity than the 9940b's.  Is this because each media manager
create its own dupes (6 Media mngrs = 6dupe jobs) which appears to not
allow me to be able to consolidate all the images to a smaller set of
tapes? (IE if I only had one master and one Media then all images would
be written to less tapes?)  I also am not mixing media retentions and 3
of the 6 vault profiles have different offsite retention.  I tried using
the alternate read server option having the Master be the alternate read
server for the 6 MediaMngrs but it was pathetically slow.

Hope I made sense here....and Thanks!

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