Here's my set up. I have a Sparc T2000 with 16 1.2Ghz cores and 16Gb of RAM 
running Solaris 10. I have three DataDomain restorers, two DD460s and a DD565. 
These are connected to a dedicated backup gigabit backup network and jumbo 
frames are implemented on the DataDomains and the T2000 interfaces that talk to 
the backup subnet. I write all of my backups to disk storage units mounted from 
the DataDomains or to a VTL on the DD565. I keep these for four weeks. I then 
duplicate the images from the DataDomains to LTO4 tape with retention levels on 
the duplicates ranging from two months to infinity (for certain archival data) 
and offsite them with Iron Mountain. I've implemented the system tuning 
recommendations in the DataDomain white paper on best practices with DataDomain 
restorers and NetBackups. I've tuned the NetBackup parameters as follows:

NET_BUFFER_SZ=262144
NUMBER_DATA_BUFFERS=256
NUMBER_DATA_BUFFERS_DISK=256
SIZE_DATA_BUFFERS=262144
SIZE_DATA_BUFFERS_DISK=262144

To take advantage of the increased value of NET_BUFFER_SZ I've increased 
tcp_recv_hiwat and tcp_xmit_hiwat to 262144 bytes from the default Solaris 10 
value of 49152 bytes.

The result of this is that when things are going well, as they are this 
morning, I can get between 120 and 150 megabytes per second throughput to two 
LTO4 drives, when things aren't going well I can see drive throughput drop to 
kilobytes per second (as measured by iostat). The latter condition seems to be 
caused by duplicating smaller backup images, bpdm has to be called, it opens 
the backup image, reads it, sends the data to bptm and bptm writes it to tape. 
When I'm duplicating the smaller images I can watch the logs and see each bpdm 
process being spawned and then each bptm being spawned and I can watch my poor 
LTO4 tape drives idling at 4 kilobytes per second, which kills me and makes me 
wonder if PETLTO4TD (People for the Ethical Treatment of LTO4 Tape Drives) are 
going to come and take my tape drives away.

Since all of my primary backups are written to a disk based storage unit 
multiplexing is set to 1. Is there a way to multiplex duplication from disk 
storage units? Failing that is there some way of writing to tape asynchronously 
so that the the buffers on the tape drives could be filled before the write 
actually happen. Are there tuning steps that I haven't taken that could improve 
the duplication performance? Any help will be, as it has been in the past, 
greatly appreciated.

Thank You,

Jamie Jamison
Network Systems Administrator
ZymoGenetics




_______________________________________________
Veritas-bu maillist  -  Veritas-bu@mailman.eng.auburn.edu
http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu

Reply via email to