Veritas-bu

[Veritas-bu] Linux media server recommendations

2007-02-09 11:31:40
Subject: [Veritas-bu] Linux media server recommendations
From: jroyer at digitalmotorworks.com (Joe Royer)
Date: Fri, 9 Feb 2007 10:31:40 -0600 (CST)
Austin,
Have you actually used a niagra as a backup server?  Does it 
really have the bus/backplane bandwidth to handle life as a master/media 
server?  I'd love to hear some real world experience (what kind and how 
many tape drives) as it's about time for me to upgrade the hardware in 
my linux master/media.

I currently have an aging IBM x345 as my master/media with four LTO2 
drives and about 2TB of DSSU, SAN attached through 2 QLA2342's (4 
ports).  I'm out of slots to add HBAs and my existing ones are near 
saturation, but that's ok because the internal bandwidth of the host 
can only handle two more LTO2 drives anyway.

Patrick,
I have used RHEL 3.x and 4.x and there is no comparison.  The kernel 
memory management is MUCH better in the 2.6 kernel (RH 4.x) allowing 
much better I/O throughput.  I have no experience with SUSE, but I'd 
imagine it still comes down to the 2.6 kernel (and Symantec support).


--Original message--
Date: Wed, 7 Feb 2007 11:41:35 -0500
From: "Austin Murphy" <austin.murphy at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] Linux media server recommendations
To: "Whelan, Patrick" <Patrick.Whelan at colt.net>
Cc: veritas-bu at mailman.eng.auburn.edu
Message-ID:
         <c9fff09c0702070841s642c4fd2o53ba5712954efc47 at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed

On 2/7/07, Whelan, Patrick <Patrick.Whelan at colt.net> wrote:
> Sorry, I was intentionally vague to see what kind of suggestions I would
receive. However, that said, the current environment has a clustered 
Solaris
Master server and 4 HP-UX media servers backing up approximately 700 
clients
of various OSes. We are adding some new clients with approximately 11TB,
total, of data to be backed up and I was just looking for ideas.

A 1U HP DL145 w/ a dual port Fibre HBA is about as budget as it gets.
  They have dual gigabit ethernet onboard.  NB5.1 on RHEL3 has an issue
with the SSO tape drives.  If you scan the fibre bus while a drive is
in use it won't find it.  I don't know if this is fixed in 6.0 or
RHEL4.

I think the Sun "niagara" systems look like the ultimate netbackup
boxes.  Just add fibre, disk, and tape..   T2000 for master, T1000's
for medias...    They are all optimized for IO and multiple
threads/processes.  Quad GigE onboard, 32GB RAM max...

Austin


-- 
Joe Royer / SysAdmin / Digital Motorworks / 512-692-1028


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