Right, so I think we're all assuming LTO3 or 4 drives... LTO3 has been
brilliant, very reliable, very fast, and very flexible. We get stressed
about spinning the drives up to full speed however, and the solution is
to involve a disk staging layer on your system - so if you wish to do
this you need to tick off:
1) can the server stream data fast enough to make all the drives busy.
(this is about value as well as not breaking the hardware by misuse).
2) can you justify the cost of the hardware.
3) is it fast enough for your nightly data load.
I'm fond of the sun T1 systems - they have consistently met the
theoretical bandwidth limits - in other words the cpu and bus bandwidth
has never been an obstacle, the o/s is stable, the san and networking
hardware works as advertised. It's about the only platform that could
actually handle a fully loaded 10GBe network and FC connected tape
devices at the same time...
However, in theory at least some of the sun opteron systems should be
faster when running solaris x86. They have similar pci express bus
architectures, the opteron cpu can pass a single thread's data faster
than the T1 chip (just going by the GHz here) and networker in some
cirucmstances is going to do better on opteron... But it's such a
complex question, which might be driven on whether you would actually
need all the throughput of a T2000, and how you are going to get the
disk space, adv_file? Or VTL?
So my money currently goes with the X4500 (4core opteron with 16GB ram,
and 48 internal 1TB SATA drives for USD$60k) with +40TB of disk space
to play with, you might be able to get away with having only 2 tape
drives (1 for staging work, 1 for redundancy).
A lot of people find having a windows backup server works out cheaper -
probably because they don't have to pay any unix weenies like me to
admin it. But once your backup load passes about 2TB per day I don't
think they give value for money (I'm biased perhaps).
Linux gets mentioned a lot - but there seems to me to be a fair deal of
effort to keep the kernel, the hardware, and the application all talking
to each other properly, If you are a mixed shop and you have solaris
admins in house, then I can't see how using linux would work out
cheaper...
(now I shall duck for cover, I've questioned the sanctity of Linux and
must be destroyed! Maybe I should have a go at insulting macintosh users
too?)
> -----Original Message-----
> From: EMC NetWorker discussion
> [mailto:NETWORKER AT LISTSERV.TEMPLE DOT EDU] On Behalf Of Yaron Zabary
> Sent: Tuesday, 12 February 2008 8:49 AM
> To: NETWORKER AT LISTSERV.TEMPLE DOT EDU
> Subject: Re: [Networker] best platform for newest networker?
>
> Sid Shapiro wrote:
> > Hello,
> > I'm about to upgrade to the latest networker and I need to
> upgrade my
> > hardware as well, so - what better time to ask :
> > What's the best platform on which to run networker server
> these days.
> > Clients are HP-UX Solaris, AIX, Linux, windows - with
> oracle, lotus notes,
> > exchange, sql-server.
> >
> > Define "best" anyway you like - best performance, best
> price-performance,
> > etc., etc..
>
> My vote goes to Solaris 10/Sparc on a T5x20 platform (just
> to be on
> the safe side, I just ordered a 6-core T1000 with a dual 4Gb Emulex
> HBA). Stability. Better hardware support (Leadville's FC
> configuration
> is trivial). Performance (built in 10Ge ports).
>
> With x86 the choise of OS is not great.
>
> >
> > I usually like to go with the primary development platform,
> but I don't
> > know what that is for networker these days. Do you?
> >
> > Thanks,
> > / Sid /
> >
> > To sign off this list, send email to
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>
>
> --
>
> -- Yaron.
>
> To sign off this list, send email to
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>
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