Re: [Veritas-bu] VTL to FAS conversion

I think your plan is good and will surprise you in its simplicity. IMO, the more smaller LUNs will be more of a problem to manage on the server as filesystems, unless you're going to wrap them up with VxVM or something similar.

Rusty Major, MCSE, BCFP, VCS ▪ Sr. Storage Engineer ▪ SunGard Availability Services ▪ 757 N. Eldridge Suite 200, Houston TX 77079 ▪ 281-584-4693
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Heathe Yeakley <hkyeakley AT gmail DOT com>
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10/26/2010 01:32 PM

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Subject	[Veritas-bu] VTL to FAS conversion

We purchased a NetApp VTL 1400 about two years ago. I integrated it into my backup environment, but I've just never gotten it to do the things I feel a VTL should be able to do. One of the problems is that we don't do a lot of restores in our environment, and so I'm not really sure what the VTL bought us in terms of actual use versus just being new and shiny. I've seen other comments here on the board and articles in trade journals and what not that indicate the industry is trending away from VTL and opting for either: * Disk to Disk to Tape * Disk to a remote site via some type of replication technology * People ditching tape altogether and just relying or various disk technologies Now, due to the nature of the data I'm backing up, I have to keep tape in the picture. In my VTL guide, it says that I can convert my VTL1400 into a FAS 3070 device. It got me to thinking.... Since I've already purchased this VTL and the Front End Terabyte license from Symantec, what if I: * Converted my VTL to a small SAN * Carved up the disks on the SAN and presented dozens of LUNS to my media servers * Via NetBackup, turn those LUNS into advanced disk storage units * Sent all my backups to the Disk storage units * Used Storage Lifecycle policies to duplicate the images off to tape In this scheme, when I came in in the morning, I'd have two copies of everything: 1 copy sitting on my disks storage units (with, say a 1 month retention) and then a secondary copy on tape which can then be shipped to Iron Mountain. This, I feel, utilizes my existing infrastructure using equipment, licenses and support agreements that I already have in place and optimizes my existing NetBackup domain. What are your thoughts on this proposed solution? Am I on the right track? Is this a stupid idea? One follow up question (assuming idea so far is good): One thing the VTL had going for it is that I could build dozens of drives and when my backups kick off at night, everyone gets a drive. There's almost no jobs that queue up waiting for a storage unit. So the amount of time it takes to actually perform the backups is greatly reduced. If I change my VTL into a SAN and present LUNS to my media servers to act as disk storage units, should I make 1 or 2 monolithic 5 or 6 TB luns per media server to hold all my backup images, or should I make dozens of 500 GB luns so that each media server has multiple available storage units which will let me perform multiple backups concurrently? Thanks for the information in advance. - HKY _______________________________________________ Veritas-bu maillist - Veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu

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