Hi Heather

If you have Cisco switches you can use EtherChannel (PAgP) which is very
similar to LACP for port aggregation - you would want to load balance by
source MAC. This should benefit your media servers depending on what
backup devices they are writing to.

You will also the need some kind of multipathing/load balancing software
running on your backup servers.

If your master server is a dedicated master you should simply configure
it for failover as a 1Gb nic should be more than enough.

What backup devices do you have on your media servers?
If you have anything which can write faster than about 60 Mb p/s you
should definitely get some load balancing setup

The bp.conf setting will push data out of a specific interface on the
client itself where possible so you would really be able to control
which interface it goes to on the media server.

You could add entries into the clients hosts file so different client
send data to different interfaces on the server but that creates single
points of failures and is a little messy

Cheers

Tal



-----Original Message-----
From: veritas-bu-bounces AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
[mailto:veritas-bu-bounces AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu] On Behalf Of Heathe
Kyle Yeakley
Sent: 08 April 2010 21:34
To: Veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
Subject: [Veritas-bu] Nic Utilization

I had a question about how everyone else utilizes the NICs inside your 
master and media servers.

I have 1 master and 2 media. Like most systems these days, I have 3-4 
NICs in each one. The administrator that setup our existing environment 
plumbed 1 NIC per machine, and the other NICs sit there, completely 
unused. At night, when our backup are running, it isn't unheard of for 
the NICs on all three machine to reach a high utilization level.

This got me to thinking. I've read that you can set an option in the 
bp.conf file and have various clients backup to different interfaces on 
the same physical master and/or media server, but I've never actually 
deployed that feature. I've also heard of a technology called Link 
Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) that allows you to tie multiple NICs

together to increase the total bandwidth into your server.

Does anyone else employ these technologies?
Does everyone else just plumb one NIC and let the backups trickle in as 
fast as the LAN allows?
Is there other aggregation technology out there that folks are using to 
utilize and squeeze more bandwidth out of those unused NICs?

Thanks.

- Heathe Kyle Yeakley

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