Veritas-bu

Re: [Veritas-bu] Best Practice: Location of the NetBackup Catalog

2008-05-13 09:19:58
Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] Best Practice: Location of the NetBackup Catalog
From: "WEAVER, Simon \(external\)" <simon.weaver AT astrium.eads DOT net>
To: "Martin, Jonathan" <JMARTI05 AT intersil DOT com>, <veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu>
Date: Tue, 13 May 2008 13:52:58 +0100
Hi Jonathan
From a "DR" point, I exchange my catalog tapes every 2 days, take a snapshot of the RAID5+Hot Spare catalog onto a SAN disk, and as an extra contingency, store a tape off into a fireproof safe.
 
Its not the recovery that is my real problem - its just that "extra" hardware layer between NetBackup and the catalog that I guess concerns me a little (not alot, but its in the back of my mind).
 
Not saying SAN is bad, because we use them for the TB's of Data we do weekly, and they do a good job.
 
But from a Master Backup situation, I just like to keep things "all together" as close as possible. Without anything being a possible "risk".
 
Again, must stress I am not saying SAN is bad (as it has been in use for years and not seen a major disaster with it), but trying to look at keeping the "Catalog" backup away from the "SAN" Production environemnt, where all data for production and critical servers reside.
 
Simon
 


From: veritas-bu-bounces AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu [mailto:veritas-bu-bounces AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu] On Behalf Of Martin, Jonathan
Sent: Tuesday, May 13, 2008 1:42 PM
To: veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] Best Practice: Location of the NetBackup Catalog

My original environment had my catalog on a 10K SAS Raid-1.  This worked for our 30TB a week, but when running scripts that queried the catalog it took forever.  I upgraded the catalog to a dedicated Raid-5 and in one case a script I would run went from an hour + to less than 10 minutes.  From my perspective the I/O increase of putting the catalog on some sort of multi-disk raid is definitely worth it.  As far as redundancy is concerned I robocopy my catalog to DR every few hours.  It won't be "up to the minute" but my RPO is pretty flexible in this regard.  If you are REALLY worried about your catalog going bad, why not consider some sort of snapshotting technology?  Alternately, how about a Raid-10 across multiple shelves?  Or if you are really desperate, a software mirror?  I've (thankfully) never had a san shelf go bad. (BAD Storage Admin!)  So I'm not as leery personally and consider our SAN about as high quality as storage gets around here.
 
-Jonathan


From: veritas-bu-bounces AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu [mailto:veritas-bu-bounces AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu] On Behalf Of WEAVER, Simon (external)
Sent: Tuesday, May 13, 2008 6:11 AM
To: Jeff Lightner; veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] Best Practice: Location of the NetBackup Catalog

Jeff
I am struggling to find anything that talks about the location or best DR practice of NBU. In the Sys Admin guide, the only reference I see about the catalog is that the binary catalog is more sensitive to the location of the catalog (see page 203 in 5.1 guide). It mentions that storing the catalog on a remote file system may have critical performance issues for catalog abckups. and that NetBackup does not support saving catalogs to a remote file system such as NFS or CIFS.
 
From a DR point of view, I would like to see the NetBackup system and catalog "outside" the control of any production SAN environment. all eggs in one basket comes to mind, and if something is going to go bang, you do not want your NetBackup environment inside this SAN. (If poss).
 
I have always stored the Data on a RAID set with a hot spare each and everytime. If I want to recover production systems attached to a SAN due to a shelf failure, I would rather be in a position and say "Hey no problem, we can do that", rather than say "sorry, got to recover my catalogs from a disk that is not presented from the SAN anymore". Obviously that is worse case scenario, and I apprecaite that.
 
Murphy's Law = If anything can go wrong, it will   :-)
 
Anyone else able to share their views on their current Catalog environment?
 
Simon


From: Jeff Lightner [mailto:jlightner AT water DOT com]
Sent: Monday, May 12, 2008 6:03 PM
To: WEAVER, Simon (external); veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
Subject: RE: [Veritas-bu] Best Practice: Location of the NetBackup Catalog

We?ve stored our NBU on SAN attached storage since inception.

 

So long as you?re doing catalog/database backups any failure whether on internal drives or on SAN drives can be recovered from.  

 

Since we also have our tape drives accesses via SAN from the master and multiple media servers it seems there would be a risk to backups if the SAN failed completely.

 

Having a complete SAN failure is something I?ve not seen in over 3 ½ years here or at various other jobs where we had SAN.  I suspect your issue at the previous job was more due to poor design of the infrastructure than to any inherent risk of using SAN vs. Internal storage.

 

Even if it IS on internal storage you do risk the server itself melting down and with RAID 5 loss of two drives at the same time (rare but HAS been seen by me in that same 3 ½ year period) would lose your catalogs/database just like losing the SAN would.   Additionally with a SAN you can (and should) have multiple paths to the data meaning loss of a single controller doesn?t blow you out of the water whereas internal RAID 5 is almost always on a single controller.

 

Finally in most environments where SANs are in place the raison d?etre for the SAN was not the backup solution but rather large disk storage needs for running environments.   In the unlikely event of a full SAN failure I suspect the main issue would be your loss of those environments rather than the backup solution though of course losing the backup solution means you?re delayed in trying to bring up the rest of the environments.   However, here again valid catalog/database backups occurring on a regular basis is the way around this ? not eliminating the SAN.   

 

You might want to have a look at NBU Disaster Recovery planning guidelines for more details as it sounds as if your prior employer was ill prepared for such a loss.

 


From: veritas-bu-bounces AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu [mailto:veritas-bu-bounces AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu] On Behalf Of WEAVER, Simon (external)
Sent: Monday, May 12, 2008 11:13 AM
To: veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
Subject: [Veritas-bu] Best Practice: Location of the NetBackup Catalog

 

All,
Just a general query on the best practice for the location of the NetBackup catalog (Its DB, images, ect).

When you install NBU on a Server, the location can be accepted as the "default" or you can customise the installation and choose an alternative location (ie: Spare drive on local server, SAN attached drive, ect).

Presently, I have NetBackup and the catalog installed locally, on RAID5 set, hot swappable.

My question is this: Is there a best practice for the location of the Catalog? For example, SAN attached disk? I sort of feel uncomfortable with this for several reasons:

1) If you lose SAN connectivity (due to a major disaster or failure) the catalog has gone
2) NetBackup and the OS relies on that disk being available constantly

Being stored locally, means the Server and its application (including the catalog) goes with it, and does not rely on an extra layer of hardware for the catalog to be available.

I think my concerns come from a previous environment where the catalog was stored on a SAN,  and was totally destroyed and unrecoverable, which meant a complete import of hundreds of tapes.

If anyone has any feedback on this, would like to hear the pro's and con's to storage off the physical server itself. I have always had the catalog locally stored.

Thanks, Simon

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