I need help
A little back ground. The company I work for has two major divisions, one is a University the other is a medical center. Currently we run 1 master server and 3 media servers.
I just came from a meeting about problems we have been having with netbackup, basically we are trying to run the system at 150% and that just doesn't work. I have expressed the need for new hardware many times, finally an outside vendor came in did an analysis and said the same thing.
Now the medical center side of the business has come up with the great idea to completly split the environment up. Have two master servers, 4 media servers and two independent tape silos. This goes against my gut feeling as well as our vendor's recommendation of 1 beefy master server and dedicating media servers to each division, with dedicated tape drives in a common silo using SSO.
I have presented the following problems that I see with having two master servers in the environment
Complexity - This will essential double all the systems managment
Cost - We will need essentially double the hardware, double the maintance fees, double the licenses, double almsot everything.
Reliabilty - I am currently able to reallocate resources on the fly in the event of a catostrophic failure, I can shift jobs to other media servers, different storage units as needed if we have an outage
Can anyone think of any other arguments against having two master servers? Or maybe I am wrong and this is the way to go, in that case please convince me that this will do anything else other than make me want to bang my head against a wall.
At my old company we had
At my old company we had multiple backup environments, to be fair, apart from the obvious downside of cost, it worked very very well. Each environment was small enough hat we didn't overload it, if there was a issue with backups in one environment, if urgent, we could move a few cables to keep vital servers backing up (rare, but on occaission ...) We ran the environment as a whole, 2500 clients, 60-70 TB data backed up a day at a succcess rate of around 98.8%.
Do you know why you ran it
Do you know why you ran it this way. I am just curious what justifies the addition cost?
Gives a short layout of youre
Gives a short layout of youre systems and sites
site a has master and all the sso servers
site b has DB servers? or just clients?
whats the QTY and type of servers at each site.
The company was big, and
The company was big, and money was not too much of a concern. We had in fact an enterprise license for the backup product (not netbackup) and therefore an extra 'master' server didn't hit us with a big bill.
I appreciate for you, you would have a greater extra cost.
However, I sometimes come across large environments, say 1 master and 150 medias. Trouble shooting environments this size is very difficult, because even a few minues of log files can have millions of lines which take a hugh amount of time to look through. If they have environments this size, why not split it to say two masters etc ... Also, and issues could wipe out all the backups in one hit.
This is only my view, and I appreciate there are fors and againsts ... but given my previous experience - I think multiple environments have benefits, and given the choice it is what I would recommend.
Extra work, no not really, once it was set up, we just left it to it's own devices. Everything was documented accurately, so we knew exactly what server could see what drives etc... so if a reconfig was required, it was simple.
What might be of interest - for some time we had an on site consultant from the software vendor - he was very highly thought of and in great demand, he also shared these views.
Thanks for your input. It
Thanks for your input.
It just came down the other day that we are definatly going with two master servers. Hopefully I will be wrong and will not see a big increase in administration. The one plus is that this is most likley going to happen with a complete hardware refresh so I will be able to start over with alot of the configuration.
I inheritted this system and haven't been thrilled with some of the ways things have been setup in the past.
Anyways thanks for your feedback.
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