There's a good point there.

Siobhan Ellis
Independant Consultant
Sydney
Australia

From: Peter Viertel <Peter.Viertel AT MACQUARIE DOT COM>

Reply-To: Legato NetWorker discussion <NETWORKER AT LISTSERV.TEMPLE DOT EDU>, Peter Viertel <Peter.Viertel AT MACQUARIE DOT COM>

To: NETWORKER AT LISTSERV.TEMPLE DOT EDU
Subject: Re: [Networker] adv_file and veritas volume manager / file system
Date: Wed, 31 May 2006 10:39:45 +1000

This all depends on what version of solaris you are running...

I have quite comfortably configured UFS on solaris9 up to 7TB (using
ODS/SVM not VxVM). With adv_file there are issues with fragmentation
over time - so if you use UFS, you need to maintain its usage to keep
below 90%.

If you want to spend a bit of money on filesystems, I wouldn't buy VxFS
- its certainly a cool product, but it too gets fragmented with
adv_file, at least it has a defrag tool, but not sure that would be
feasable with a 4.8TB filesystem....

Sun has a product that they spend very little time spruiking, its called
SAM-FS, it's cheaper than VxFS for just the filesystem part of the
package (eg don't buy archiving or sharing components).

The big question when moving to less adv_file devices is whether your
tape drive can keep up with the staging demand... A solution is to still
have several adv_file devices but these are all subdirectories of a
single filesystem - in this way you can run multiple staging session at
once and spread the load over multiple tape drives - the problem here is
whether your disk configuration can supply data fast enough....

As for your plan.... You will end up with a configuration involving
concatonated LUNs when perhaps striping would give better performance,
so if that's the case I would suggest borrowing some extra disk space,
mirroring your current volumes onto the temporary space, dropping the
mirrors, configuring your real disk space as optimally as possible and
then configure new adv_file volumes, put your old adv_file devices into
Service Mode and wait 5 days for the old data to be staged away....


-----Original Message-----
From: Legato NetWorker discussion [mailto:NETWORKER AT listserv.temple DOT edu]
On Behalf Of Nancy Magers
Sent: Wednesday, 31 May 2006 9:28 AM
To: NETWORKER AT listserv.temple DOT edu
Subject: [Networker] adv_file and veritas volume manager / file system

Hi Networker Listserv,

I have never posted here before but have gotten tons of usefull
information
over the years from this list.   So I thought I'd ask the question here
before diving in on my server...

I have a Solaris server/storage node running Networker 7.2.2 - I
currently have 4 1.2TB adv_file on my primary backup pool for this
server.  These file systems holding about 5 days of backups.  I know I
could get more onto these if I had 1 x 4.8TB filesystem, this would also
avoid a few other pesky problems like a single volume filling up.  So
the only way I can figure out how to do this on Solaris is to use
Veritas Volume Manager and VXFS - I would stage all the data off one of
my adv_file volumes to tape, then using that device I could create a
veritas volume - and start staging data from the second volume to it -
then concatenate the empty second volume on to the
first   volume, I would keep doing this till I had all 4 volumes
together.

Is there anyone running with this sort of a configuration - do you see
any pitfalls that I might be missing in this.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Nancy Magers
Manager Unix Systems
Brown University

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