Sounds very slow for the full backup and obviously if it takes four days, the data is  being modified at least two of them ... how much data is your full backup and what tape drives (and how many) do you have ?

Have you tried performance tweaking of NetBackup (looking at multi-streaming, multiplexing etc) ? Do you know where the bottleneck is (is it the Exchange server sending data to the media server, media server sending to tape or the tape drives themselves) ...

Have you looked at http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/281842.htm ?

As for EV & NBU, I have used EV servers as NetBackup media servers few years ago it worked fine then. Dont know if it still does ..!

 A couple of suggestions:

1. You could customize the collections. I've had some customers tell me that changing the default collection parameters from 10 MB max helped them (the old default used to be 200 MB). Haven't personally tried that.
2. You could close partitions more regularly, at smaller sizes.
3. Once you have closed partitions, you don't need to back it up with the same kind of regularity, since the data is fairly static (although in fact user-specific data changes and data reaching retention gets deleted; this is fairly trivial compared with missing new data, etc)
4. Use features like NetBackup's FlashBackup. This feature does a raw disk backup (which are very fast, but have the disadvantage of not allowing single file resores), however because it also gets the file systems' metadata, it will allow you to do individual file restores.
5. Use NetBackup off-host backups. This would use some technology (whether Symantec's Storage Foundation, or your hardware vendors feature) to create data snapshots, and allow them to be backed up from a secondary server (e.g. the NetBackup media server), instead of impacting the EV server.

EV server could still be used as a media server, for sure, however you need to be careful about impacting server performance (i.e. time backups and archiving so they don't overlap). Also, NetBackup has a SAN Client license now (it's like a SAN Media Server, but lighter) for this type of self-backup operation.

Hope this helps!




 

Thanks very much for the suggestions.  I will discuss it with our backup support and see what they can do.

Do you know if there is a best practice doc for backups anywhere?

Does anyone know if NetBackup's Flashbackup is supported in a MS Clustered environment?  We have an Active Active Passive setup for EV.

Yeah this works fine in an MS Clustered environment - only of course you will never fail over backups. If you fail over, backups/restores will need to be restarted.

why not ask in the NBU section?

There are so many different places to post these days I am not sure which one to use.  Thanks for sharing though.

Our NetBackup support people said it is right in the doucmentation that Flashbackup is not Supported for MS Clusters.  They tried the normal setup - it works on a non-clustered server, but they could not get it to run on EV's cluster.   Anyone know of any special settings that may help here?  I know it is a long shot.

Thank you!