We have had a chance to side-by-side a 5220 with a DD860 for the past
couple of years and each has its high and low points.
Most of that time we didn't have a backup replication solution in place
and depended on duplicating back to tape off of each device for offsite
storage. The Data Domain is hands down much better at reconstructing its
data for this purpose. I do understand this isn't normally an intended
operation, but pulling even less than 10 images off of the 5220 at one
time was work that produced significant load on it as to impede its normal
operation.
The hardware reliability of our 5220 atrocious. I can't tell you how many
raid cards have been switched out of this thing. If we have had a couple
of disk failures on the DD860 the past couple of years, but I always find
out about those after the fact. My datacenter people tell me that EMC was
here to switch it out and that is that.
We did place another 5220 at our DR site with a DD4200 and implemented
AIR. This is the by far the best thing we ever did for our backup
environment. The remote 5220 does well as a remote master server handling
the OST device and keeping track of images coming in. Alleviating the
need to send offsite tapes was a boon to the process overall. We had a DR
exercise last week and having everything there already without the need of
propping up a tape library and a server to manage it was well worth the
overall effort.
The 5220 performs well as a tape media server, again another function that
it more than likely isn't intended to be used for. Performing as a media
server for the Data Domain does well also.
We depend on the local 5220 to handle the VMware backups over SAN and it
doesn't keep up with what we need. It is just not built to handle the
load.
Right now, I am in the market for another device, and I am going to
probably lean toward the Data Domain with another media server that uses
10gb interfaces. We have really had to limit what we send to the 5220,
and we are realizing that we may even have to pare that back. We really
liked it for the VMware capabilities, but performance is an issue and we
may be finding ourselves using the Data Domain for some of that load as
well.
If you have a large VMware install base, you will be well served to
perform some load testing with proof of concept devices. We were burnt by
not doing enough of that ahead of time. In this space, performance and
functionality go hand-in-hand at times.
From: "Scott Jacobson"
To: "Mikhail Nikitin" ,
Date: 11/16/2014 01:48 PM
Subject:Re: [Veritas-bu] Netbackup Appliance Vs Data Domain
Sent by:veritas-bu-boun...@mailman.eng.auburn.edu
You'll likely receive many responses to your inquire so I add mine as
well. In my research with DD and Quantum is that they were all compatible
pieces to create the solution your seeking, however, there are many moving
parts in getting them to work and some features are missing (as mentioned,
ie. OST) compared to the Symantec Appliances. The Symantec Appliances
have many of the best of bread software products built in i.e. Storage
Foundation/High Availability etc.
Your environment sounds like an exact copy of ours. I currently have three
5230's deployed globally for the primary purpose of A.I.R., but also have
one of them at our primary Data Center location whose additional function
was to reduce backup windows and deduplicate data - all is working as
promoted and designed. I've about a 72% deduplication rate with
structured and unstructured data. Accelerator based backups are crazy
fast after the first initial Full backup - two examples:
1. A 21 hour Full back up to LTO IV tape (dedicated backup network
infrastructure) now takes only 50 minutes to the 5230 deduplication pool.
2. At an East Coast office a local backup of a 375 Gb Windows server with
1.8 million files would take around 9 to 10 hours. Again, with Accelerator
enabled and the backup occurring over the WAN to our 5230 Appliance
deduplication pool 2000 miles away, the backup only takes 1 hour 10
minutes. The rate from the NBU Console reports 89121 KB Per Second. (this
may sound misleading, but you have to get your head around what the
Accelerate and its Track Journal is doing which is comparing (no tree
walk) de-duped block changes and sending only new blocks that don't reside
on the target Appliance)
Symantec just announced the 5330 which is of course faster than the 5230
and it can scale to 229 Tb so this maybe something you might want to look
into. Note also that a 5230 can be either a Master or Media server (all of
mine are Media Servers) and the 5330 can only be a Media server which is
not a limiting factor in my opinion.
I won't get into the discussion of whose better, NetBackup, EMC or
Commvault because we are a Symantec NetBackup shop. I'll leave that
response alone and to those who wish to share their experiences.
Scott
>>> Mikhail
