Re: [Veritas-bu] DSSU/DSU experience
How does the veritas licensing works for DSSU and VTL ? As far as I know, VTL is based on capacity. Is their a licensing requirement for DSSU as well ? TIA -Shyam On 4/27/06, Matthew Stier [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: With the recording speeds of todays tape drives, you have to put somekind of disk in front of them, to ensure you have a steady stream of data to record.Without it, your just going to wear out the drives,even faster than before.And no matter how fast tape drives get, theywill never match the throughput of disk, and thus never match them, in reducing backup windows.I recently (January) replaced a six drive DLT7000 library with anOverland Storage NEO8000/REO9000 combination.The performancedifference is dramatic. And with plenty of disk, in the second D in D2D2T the wear on the tape drives have been drastically reduced. Ithas taken 4 months to reach the 100 hours milestone of per-drive wear.Something I did on a weekly basis with the DLT7000's. I originally looked at the REO9000 with the intent to use it as a VTL,but (NetBackup) licensing costs, and the virtual media overhead Iencountered, in that mode, I chose to simply slice it up onto 1 TB partitions, mount them on my media server (Sun Enterprise 450 runningSolaris 8) and use them as Disk Storage Staging Units (DSSU).VTL's do have their strengths.Nearly a unlimited number of virtualdrives; and by using smaller virtual media; a high flexibility in the allocation of disk amongst numerous policies.They are nearly the onlysolution in situations, where the disk staging on the media server isnot an option. Many VTL manufacturers are also PTL manufactures, and often tightly couple their offering. Even to the point of staging datafrom disk to tape, outside the scope of the backup software.DSSU's do have their weaknesses. You are typically stuck with one-to-oneration between DSSU's and policies. This fit my needs, but for those with a multitude of policies to manage, I can see them having problems.Steven L. Sesar wrote: We're in the process of rearchitecting our BUR infrastructure. The most profound change will be the addition of disk storage, as we are 100% tape, right now. We're considering a few different disk technologies, such as VTL, DataDomain NAS heads, as well as traditional DSU/DSSUs. I've heard anecdotal evidence that DSU/DSSU functionality in NBU 5.1 is less-than-stellar. Would anyone care to share their overall experience withdisk storage? Thanks, Steve ___ Veritas-bu maillist-Veritas-bu@mailman.eng.auburn.edu http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu
Re: [Veritas-bu] DSSU/DSU experience
On Thu, Apr 27, 2006 at 05:17:41PM -0400, Matthew Stier wrote: DSSU's do have their weaknesses. You are typically stuck with one-to-one ration between DSSU's and policies. This fit my needs, but for those with a multitude of policies to manage, I can see them having problems. We have a lot of policies using the same DSSUs and have not run into any issues with doing this. The only time we have dedicated DSSUs is for databases and that's to guarantee that their last backup is on DSSU for a restore. .../Ed -- Ed Wilts, Mounds View, MN, USA mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ Veritas-bu maillist - Veritas-bu@mailman.eng.auburn.edu http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu
Re: [Veritas-bu] DSSU/DSU experience
Ed is correct. Multiple Policies can be written to the same DSSU, however, the contents of a DSSU can only be copied to a single "Volume Pool". So you going to need at least a unique DSSU for each Volume Pool you want staged. In my environment, I have 5 Volume Pools. The first is a NAS, and can feed the LTO3 drives a full speed. (So it didn't make sense to stage them) The 2nd, 3rd, and 4th, are databases held on three different servers, and are backed up across a gigabit backbone. Each of these have their own DSSU on the media server. Which is then copied it's own Volume Pool in the PTL. The 5th covers everything else. Nearly a dozen policies that backed up to two DSSU's, which feed a single Volume Pool. Ed Wilts wrote: On Thu, Apr 27, 2006 at 05:17:41PM -0400, Matthew Stier wrote: DSSU's do have their weaknesses. You are typically stuck with one-to-one ration between DSSU's and policies. This fit my needs, but for those with a multitude of policies to manage, I can see them having problems. We have a lot of policies using the same DSSUs and have not run into any issues with doing this. The only time we have dedicated DSSUs is for databases and that's to guarantee that their last backup is on DSSU for a restore. .../Ed begin:vcard fn:Matthew Stier n:Stier;Matthew org:Fujitsu Network Communications;CAE adr:Sixth Floor;;Two Blue Hill Plaza;Pearl River;NY;10965;USA email;internet:[EMAIL PROTECTED] title:Principal Engineer tel;work:845-731-2097 tel;fax:845-731-2011 tel;cell:845-893-0575 x-mozilla-html:TRUE version:2.1 end:vcard
RE: [Veritas-bu] DSSU/DSU experience
Steve, Works fine as long as you're at least MP4. Prior to that DSSUs would stage the files in the filesystem sequentially regardless of retention levels. Thus if you're not mixing retention on a tape (but are on the filesystem) you could have the situation where tapes are constantly being mounted and unmounted, killing the advantages of the batch nature of DSSU. With 5.1 MP4 this has been fixed by separating the staging jobs by retention level though you'll want to take note of MAX_STAGING_JOBS and STAGING_JOB_KB_LIMIT parameters. Other note is not to get too cheap of disk for this work, and make sure there's enough of it. One day's worth of problems can back you up trying to stage to tape for several days afterwards. G. -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Steven L. Sesar Sent: Thursday, April 27, 2006 10:09 AM To: NetBackup Veritas Subject: [Veritas-bu] DSSU/DSU experience We're in the process of rearchitecting our BUR infrastructure. The most profound change will be the addition of disk storage, as we are 100% tape, right now. We're considering a few different disk technologies, such as VTL, DataDomain NAS heads, as well as traditional DSU/DSSUs. I've heard anecdotal evidence that DSU/DSSU functionality in NBU 5.1 is less-than-stellar. Would anyone care to share their overall experience with disk storage? Thanks, Steve ___ Veritas-bu maillist - Veritas-bu@mailman.eng.auburn.edu http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu ___ Veritas-bu maillist - Veritas-bu@mailman.eng.auburn.edu http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu
RE: [Veritas-bu] DSSU/DSU experience
You can't share DSSU amongst multiples media servers. You can't create DSSU-groups (ie when one is full, switch to another..apparantly fixed in 6.0) DSSU are mapped one-to-one to volume pools, when de-staging. Previous to 5.0MP4, (unsure about 5.1) DSSU's might not purge in time for backups and jobs would fail. That's just off the top of my head Paul -- -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Geyer, Gregory Sent: April 27, 2006 1:28 PM To: Steven L. Sesar; NetBackup Veritas Subject: RE: [Veritas-bu] DSSU/DSU experience Steve, Works fine as long as you're at least MP4. Prior to that DSSUs would stage the files in the filesystem sequentially regardless of retention levels. Thus if you're not mixing retention on a tape (but are on the filesystem) you could have the situation where tapes are constantly being mounted and unmounted, killing the advantages of the batch nature of DSSU. With 5.1 MP4 this has been fixed by separating the staging jobs by retention level though you'll want to take note of MAX_STAGING_JOBS and STAGING_JOB_KB_LIMIT parameters. Other note is not to get too cheap of disk for this work, and make sure there's enough of it. One day's worth of problems can back you up trying to stage to tape for several days afterwards. G. -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Steven L. Sesar Sent: Thursday, April 27, 2006 10:09 AM To: NetBackup Veritas Subject: [Veritas-bu] DSSU/DSU experience We're in the process of rearchitecting our BUR infrastructure. The most profound change will be the addition of disk storage, as we are 100% tape, right now. We're considering a few different disk technologies, such as VTL, DataDomain NAS heads, as well as traditional DSU/DSSUs. I've heard anecdotal evidence that DSU/DSSU functionality in NBU 5.1 is less-than-stellar. Would anyone care to share their overall experience with disk storage? Thanks, Steve ___ Veritas-bu maillist - Veritas-bu@mailman.eng.auburn.edu http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu ___ Veritas-bu maillist - Veritas-bu@mailman.eng.auburn.edu http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu La version française suit le texte anglais. This email may contain privileged and/or confidential information, and the Bank of Canada does not waive any related rights. Any distribution, use, or copying of this email or the information it contains by other than the intended recipient is unauthorized. If you received this email in error please delete it immediately from your system and notify the sender promptly by email that you have done so. Le présent courriel peut contenir de l'information privilégiée ou confidentielle. La Banque du Canada ne renonce pas aux droits qui s'y rapportent. Toute diffusion, utilisation ou copie de ce courriel ou des renseignements qu'il contient par une personne autre que le ou les destinataires désignés est interdite Si vous recevez ce courriel par erreur, veuillez le supprimer immédiatement et envoyer sans délai à l'expéditeur un message électronique pour l'aviser que vous avez éliminé de votre ordinateur toute copie du courriel reçu.
RE: [Veritas-bu] DSSU/DSU experience
I have been using DSSU since 5.1 came out. But I have primarily used it for very slow clients so that I didn't block my tapedrives with these backups. It has been working really fine, except the lack of configuration and performance/tuning. And it has been really easy to use. I have upgraded to 6.0 MP2 now, and there are a lot of nice new stuff in 6.0 regarding DSSU, but I haven't had that much time to check it out. But it seems to perform better and there are also more configuration options. Not that I couldn't make a 1 meter list of things I would like to have. DSU's I have only used for testing, so no comments from me on that. But when I looked at it DSSU seemed to me to be a much better solution. At least in our installation. Have never used VTL, so also no comments on that. /johnny -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Steven L. Sesar Sent: 27. april 2006 19:09 To: NetBackup Veritas Subject: [Veritas-bu] DSSU/DSU experience We're in the process of rearchitecting our BUR infrastructure. The most profound change will be the addition of disk storage, as we are 100% tape, right now. We're considering a few different disk technologies, such as VTL, DataDomain NAS heads, as well as traditional DSU/DSSUs. I've heard anecdotal evidence that DSU/DSSU functionality in NBU 5.1 is less-than-stellar. Would anyone care to share their overall experience with disk storage? Thanks, Steve ___ Veritas-bu maillist - Veritas-bu@mailman.eng.auburn.edu http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu ___ Veritas-bu maillist - Veritas-bu@mailman.eng.auburn.edu http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu
RE: [Veritas-bu] DSSU/DSU experience
DSSU sizing is really important. If the Disk runs out then you start getting status 84's and jobs fail. This seems reasonable except that NBU does not free up the space for the failed jobs until the jobs are restarted. If the job is a large one then you could get several more backup failures from other jobs before the job retries and cleans up the old space from the failed backup. The cleanup process for disk images already copied to tape is not very efficient. I also have had to create a script that checks for disk backup images that are successfully copied to tape so that I can clean up the images to make room for the new backups coming in. The script also checks for high and low watermarks and emails/pages if the disk space gets lower than 90% I also agree that you want to use fast disk for this. We have tested with a few different levels and are now using SAN attached RAID10 I am at NBU 5.1MP4. I am looking at moving to NBU 6.0 MP2 to take advantage of all the new DSSU improvements and features. Monte -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Johnny Oestergaard Sent: Thursday, April 27, 2006 10:44 AM To: 'Steven L. Sesar'; 'NetBackup Veritas' Subject: RE: [Veritas-bu] DSSU/DSU experience I have been using DSSU since 5.1 came out. But I have primarily used it for very slow clients so that I didn't block my tapedrives with these backups. It has been working really fine, except the lack of configuration and performance/tuning. And it has been really easy to use. I have upgraded to 6.0 MP2 now, and there are a lot of nice new stuff in 6.0 regarding DSSU, but I haven't had that much time to check it out. But it seems to perform better and there are also more configuration options. Not that I couldn't make a 1 meter list of things I would like to have. DSU's I have only used for testing, so no comments from me on that. But when I looked at it DSSU seemed to me to be a much better solution. At least in our installation. Have never used VTL, so also no comments on that. /johnny -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Steven L. Sesar Sent: 27. april 2006 19:09 To: NetBackup Veritas Subject: [Veritas-bu] DSSU/DSU experience We're in the process of rearchitecting our BUR infrastructure. The most profound change will be the addition of disk storage, as we are 100% tape, right now. We're considering a few different disk technologies, such as VTL, DataDomain NAS heads, as well as traditional DSU/DSSUs. I've heard anecdotal evidence that DSU/DSSU functionality in NBU 5.1 is less-than-stellar. Would anyone care to share their overall experience with disk storage? Thanks, Steve ___ Veritas-bu maillist - Veritas-bu@mailman.eng.auburn.edu http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu ___ Veritas-bu maillist - Veritas-bu@mailman.eng.auburn.edu http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu ___ Veritas-bu maillist - Veritas-bu@mailman.eng.auburn.edu http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu
Re: [Veritas-bu] DSSU/DSU experience
Interesting. We have had similar issues with NBU DSSUs. The HPSS (www.hpss-collaboration.org/hpss) seems to be the best option, combined with ACSLS, for our environment. We have HPSS running with other equipment in one of our scientific divisions (www.nersc.gov) and they just rave about its abilities. I note it supports (server,disk and offline storage on the server-side) Solaris and AIX. But the client-side support is there for many, many other platforms, from Cray T3 UNICOS to Linux, where there are a variety of tools to use (such as htar and other HSI unix-like tools). We are thinking about a hybrid NBU/HPSS approach, allowing data to be staged in various areas of storage, based on user-customizable rules. Backups would be on top of the ACSLS and HPSS. Just my $.02. Certainly not the cheapest solution, but it does give more manageability to at least larger SAN environments like ours. hth Cheers! --Chris Ambrose, Monte wrote: DSSU sizing is really important. If the Disk runs out then you start getting status 84's and jobs fail. This seems reasonable except that NBU does not free up the space for the failed jobs until the jobs are restarted. If the job is a large one then you could get several more backup failures from other jobs before the job retries and cleans up the old space from the failed backup. The cleanup process for disk images already copied to tape is not very efficient. I also have had to create a script that checks for disk backup images that are successfully copied to tape so that I can clean up the images to make room for the new backups coming in. The script also checks for high and low watermarks and emails/pages if the disk space gets lower than 90% I also agree that you want to use fast disk for this. We have tested with a few different levels and are now using SAN attached RAID10 I am at NBU 5.1MP4. I am looking at moving to NBU 6.0 MP2 to take advantage of all the new DSSU improvements and features. Monte -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Johnny Oestergaard Sent: Thursday, April 27, 2006 10:44 AM To: 'Steven L. Sesar'; 'NetBackup Veritas' Subject: RE: [Veritas-bu] DSSU/DSU experience I have been using DSSU since 5.1 came out. But I have primarily used it for very slow clients so that I didn't block my tapedrives with these backups. It has been working really fine, except the lack of configuration and performance/tuning. And it has been really easy to use. I have upgraded to 6.0 MP2 now, and there are a lot of nice new stuff in 6.0 regarding DSSU, but I haven't had that much time to check it out. But it seems to perform better and there are also more configuration options. Not that I couldn't make a 1 meter list of things I would like to have. DSU's I have only used for testing, so no comments from me on that. But when I looked at it DSSU seemed to me to be a much better solution. At least in our installation. Have never used VTL, so also no comments on that. /johnny -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Steven L. Sesar Sent: 27. april 2006 19:09 To: NetBackup Veritas Subject: [Veritas-bu] DSSU/DSU experience We're in the process of rearchitecting our BUR infrastructure. The most profound change will be the addition of disk storage, as we are 100% tape, right now. We're considering a few different disk technologies, such as VTL, DataDomain NAS heads, as well as traditional DSU/DSSUs. I've heard anecdotal evidence that DSU/DSSU functionality in NBU 5.1 is less-than-stellar. Would anyone care to share their overall experience with disk storage? Thanks, Steve ___ Veritas-bu maillist - Veritas-bu@mailman.eng.auburn.edu http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu ___ Veritas-bu maillist - Veritas-bu@mailman.eng.auburn.edu http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu ___ Veritas-bu maillist - Veritas-bu@mailman.eng.auburn.edu http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu ___ Veritas-bu maillist - Veritas-bu@mailman.eng.auburn.edu http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu
Re: [Veritas-bu] DSSU/DSU experience
With the recording speeds of todays tape drives, you have to put some kind of disk in front of them, to ensure you have a steady stream of data to record. Without it, your just going to wear out the drives, even faster than before. And no matter how fast tape drives get, they will never match the throughput of disk, and thus never match them, in reducing backup windows. I recently (January) replaced a six drive DLT7000 library with an Overland Storage NEO8000/REO9000 combination. The performance difference is dramatic. And with plenty of disk, in the second D in D2D2T the wear on the tape drives have been drastically reduced. It has taken 4 months to reach the 100 hours milestone of per-drive wear. Something I did on a weekly basis with the DLT7000's. I originally looked at the REO9000 with the intent to use it as a VTL, but (NetBackup) licensing costs, and the virtual media overhead I encountered, in that mode, I chose to simply slice it up onto 1 TB partitions, mount them on my media server (Sun Enterprise 450 running Solaris 8) and use them as Disk Storage Staging Units (DSSU). VTL's do have their strengths. Nearly a unlimited number of virtual drives; and by using smaller virtual media; a high flexibility in the allocation of disk amongst numerous policies. They are nearly the only solution in situations, where the disk staging on the media server is not an option. Many VTL manufacturers are also PTL manufactures, and often tightly couple their offering. Even to the point of staging data from disk to tape, outside the scope of the backup software. DSSU's do have their weaknesses. You are typically stuck with one-to-one ration between DSSU's and policies. This fit my needs, but for those with a multitude of policies to manage, I can see them having problems. Steven L. Sesar wrote: We're in the process of rearchitecting our BUR infrastructure. The most profound change will be the addition of disk storage, as we are 100% tape, right now. We're considering a few different disk technologies, such as VTL, DataDomain NAS heads, as well as traditional DSU/DSSUs. I've heard anecdotal evidence that DSU/DSSU functionality in NBU 5.1 is less-than-stellar. Would anyone care to share their overall experience with disk storage? Thanks, Steve ___ Veritas-bu maillist - Veritas-bu@mailman.eng.auburn.edu http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu begin:vcard fn:Matthew Stier n:Stier;Matthew org:Fujitsu Network Communications;CAE adr:Sixth Floor;;Two Blue Hill Plaza;Pearl River;NY;10965;USA email;internet:[EMAIL PROTECTED] title:Principal Engineer tel;work:845-731-2097 tel;fax:845-731-2011 tel;cell:845-893-0575 x-mozilla-html:TRUE version:2.1 end:vcard
