As we are doing the exact same thing I would say good idea ;-)
We are going away from a head-ache producing VTL as well. We also recently
upgraded to the NetBackup volume based licensing model. That way we could make
use of Advanced Disk and all other interesting features and agents.
We are going from several (+20) Media Servers to only 4 (DSSU) each with a Disk
Staging volume of 15-20TB. Each Media Server will have 10Gbe NIC's in them for
backups over the LAN, an HBA dedicated for Fiber Transport and other HBA's to
connect to the SAN for disk and tape (LTO5) connectivity.
When the VTL is phased out we will reuse its disks to construct 2 extra Media
Servers each with 70TB of staging disk.
Like Rusty said, it is better to build larger LUN's instead of lot's and lot's
of smaller ones. Creating lot's of LUN's will only make your life much harder.
We have been running on live with some DSSU servers now and I must say that
this setup is really simple and easy to maintain.
Just make sure the DSSU disks as well as the Media Servers can handle multiple
(fast) incoming and outgoing traffic.
Best Regards,
Bart WALLEBROEK
Backup Admin & Systems & Applications Management & Support Specialist
Enterprise Applications Delivery - Infrastructure Management
S.W.I.F.T. SCRL
Message: 1
Date: Tue, 26 Oct 2010 13:32:13 -0500
From: Heathe Yeakley <hkyeakley AT gmail DOT com>
Subject: [Veritas-bu] VTL to FAS conversion
To: NetBackup Mailing List <veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu>
Message-ID:
<AANLkTin-kNQwBZaqx1CWdxUR8eWV6O_Zw7a4D=fiGASa AT mail.gmail DOT com>
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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
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