Hi,
Im sure others will reply, but my thought....
Defragmentation will happen on most file systems. Programs like
Diskeeper will do the trick, but ensure its done out of hours. To be
honest, I have not seen that much of a performance increase in backup
speeds after a defrag. I think alot depends on whether you are using
volume compression to compress the Data and how the clients are
configured for backups. also, the type of Data on the volumes. The built
in defrag sucks in my view, so consider another alternative rather than
the "Win2k / Win2k3" version.
Hosts connected to a HP EVA are all going to be sharing spindles :-) so
I would rule that out. Again, it comes down to the end client, how its
configured, whats being backed up.
We use SAN Media Servers for our large systems with volumes. It works
well.
What I would tend to do is look at your multiplexing and see if you can
alter to make use of more drives if poss. Also, verify how the backup
policy is configured for streams. For example if you have a Win2k3
System with 5 Drives, consider streaming the drives seperately or maybe
2 volumes into a single stream.
If these are LAN based clients, then you are not going to get good
throughput, especially if the volumes are fast. As a rule of thumb if it
takes approx 30 hours to backup a 500GB volume, a SAN Media Server could
(depending on the files) backup the system in say 12 - 14 hours. Again,
alot does tend to rely on compression, type of data, file size ect.
One other option to consider is Flash Backup. I am looking into this,
but not sure at this stage if it will really help my situation.
Faster disks (like the HP EVA) is a bonus. Turning off any extra I/O
like Anti-Virus during a backup WILL also help.
Just my views
Thanks, Simon
-----Original Message-----
From: veritas-bu-bounces AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
[mailto:veritas-bu-bounces AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu] On Behalf Of Mellor,
Adam A.
Sent: Friday, February 15, 2008 1:36 PM
To: VERITAS-BU AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
Cc: Ed Wilts
Subject: [Veritas-bu] Speaking of NTFS:
My backup systems are Solaris, I have the "luxury" of vxfs filesystems
for my staging & database areas.
I do however back up Windows file servers, Are there any guidelines to
NTFS volumes that people would recommend ?
I thinking along the lines:
Defragmenting,
Number of streams,
LUN Virtulization tech,
Volume Sizes,
Maintaining free space,
Snapshot methods,
impact of ohh sooo many small files
Performance improvements with Advanced client / Flashbackup,
SAN Media server,
(For the adventurous) SAN client ?
For example, i currently have pain with about a dozen windows clients,
from what i can tell
we do not do defragmentaion
their LUNS live on HP EVA's sharing spindles with hosts
Free Space is minimum (~7%)
Volumes are only ~500GB
We backup with Multiple streams (Exceeds weekend (and daily)
backup window if we don't (Windows are large)
Currently backing up the windows dataservers is a pain point for me, I
am interested in hearing peoples learnings / Golden rules when it comes
to backing up large (over 500GB) NTFS Volumes.
Adam Mellor
Senior Unix Support Analyst
CF IT TECHNOLOGY SERVICES
Woodside Energy Ltd.
________________________________
From: Ed Wilts [mailto:ewilts AT ewilts DOT org]
Sent: Thursday, 14 February 2008 1:17 PM
To: Mellor, Adam A.
Cc: VERITAS-BU AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] Defrag DSU?
On Feb 13, 2008 6:22 PM, Mellor, Adam A. <Adam.Mellor AT woodside.com DOT au>
wrote:
Although I am not currently defragmenting my current DSU
volumes, I
previously had ~4TB in a single DSU under NBU 5.1 . This volume
was
running vxfs
vxfs says it all, you lucky guy. NTFS just sucks... try a 4TB DSSU on
Windows and see how much fun you have.
I do like your idea of dropping the threshold to a low value to empty it
out more frequently though.
.../Ed
--
Ed Wilts, Mounds View, MN, USA
mailto:ewilts AT ewilts DOT org
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