Veritas-bu

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

2008-05-14 01:36:39
Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] Best Practice: Location of the NetBackupCatalog
From: "WEAVER, Simon \(external\)" <simon.weaver AT astrium.eads DOT net>
To: "Ed Wilts" <ewilts AT ewilts DOT org>
Date: Wed, 14 May 2008 06:06:20 +0100
Ed
Its not really about SAN reliability. Its about the best practice to locate the catalog. Is storing the catalog on a Production SAN with Production Data the best method, or would it be feasible to locate the catalog "outside" the production SAN.
 
Difference in recovery could vary. For example, if there was a SAN outage, failure (whatever you want to define it), and production Data is lost, including your Catalog then before ANY recovery takes place, you have to bprecover (could take 40 - 2 hours depending on the size of the catalog. I think one post noticed 1TB). Times are only an estimate.
 
If the Catalog was on its own SAN, or RAID+Hot Swap, it is one less step involved to start recovery on production systems.
 
I am happy about the catalog on a RAID5, Hot swappable, and yes I have seen a complete RAID set die, including a SAN environment totally destroyed all known disk groups, complete unrecoverable data and loss of catalog. What did not help was the lack of knowledge about recovering netbackup and the catalog tape process.
 
If there is a document that symentec gives preference about the location of a catalog then it would be nice to see it. I am guessing that as most post's shows its on the SAN, its probably not a big deal.
 
I just look at it that from a DR point, keeping everything about NetBackup grouped together, including the catalog.
 
Ed, 34 years old and probably older than yourself young man, but as posted, some of the failures I have seen have been quite interesting to see :-)
 
Thanks for your reply
 
Warm Regards
Simon


From: veritas-bu-bounces AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu [mailto:veritas-bu-bounces AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu] On Behalf Of Ed Wilts
Sent: Tuesday, May 13, 2008 10:08 PM
To: WEAVER, Simon (external)
Cc: veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] Best Practice: Location of the NetBackupCatalog

On Mon, May 12, 2008 at 10:13 AM, WEAVER, Simon (external) <simon.weaver AT astrium.eads DOT net> wrote:

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

If you lose 2 drives in somewhat rapid succession, your catalog is gone.  The 2nd drive typically fails while you're rebuilding the RAIDset after the first one dies due to the high load put on the drives.  If you haven't seen a double-disk failure yet, you're not old enough.  Whether the drives are hot swappable or not doesn't matter.  What matters is whether the RAID rebuild completes before the 2nd drive dies.  The race is on and sometimes the RAID rebuild doesn't complete in time.
 

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

If you lose SAN connectivity, you lose*access* to the catalog - you don't lose the catalog.

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.

The likelihood of a well managed enterprise SAN destroying the data is FAR less likely than a double-disk failure of a RAID-5 set.  FAR, FAR, FAR less.

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.

My catalog is on the SAN.  It's replicated to another SAN array.  It's also backed up to tape and the recovery information is emailed to my home email address (since my work email is also SAN-based).
 
If you can't trust the reliability of your SAN, get another SAN and/or SAN admin.  And I'm a SAN admin...

   .../Ed
--
Ed Wilts, Mounds View, MN, USA
RHCE, BCFP, BCSD, SCSP
mailto:ewilts AT ewilts DOT org

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