When we talk about performance issues a couple of things immediately come to mind. Probably first is making sure the expectations are realistic. Then we start the search for the bottleneck. There is always a bottleneck. Sometimes it will be a fast bottleneck but it is still there and you must know where it is before you can do anything else. Once you know where the bottleneck is you will know what your options are to increase performance and you will also have a very good idea what your expectations should really be.
There is not real rocket science involved in locating the bottleneck. It really just involves being systematic, keeping good notes, and having a good plan. There are several places where there is documentation to help with this process including the NetBackup 6.5 Backup Planning and Performance Tuning Guide (updated October 1, 2008) which is available on the Symantec support website...
I’ve lived in a couple major metropolitan areas. The kind with rush hour traffic so heavy a toddler on a tricycle can make better time. Sometimes the major arteries have an HOV lane – a golden pathway of asphalt for High Occupancy Vehicles. My route through Minneapolis has one. When I lived in New Jersey, I had to endure 25 miles of watching traffic zoom by us poor slobs in the neighboring lanes. There were times when the force of the air rushing by caused my car to sway. Popular rumor had it that some of the passenger silhouettes were really blowup dolls. It’s New York. Anything is possible and in fact highly probable.
So what do HOV lanes have in common with backup jobs? The new disk pool and disk storage unit design in NetBackup 6.5 allows you to treat some of your most precious client backup jobs as cars privileged to drive the fast...
Do you have Microsoft SQL Server in your environment? Then you should register for our webcast on NetBackup for SQL Server coming up in December. It will be hosted by Brian Smith and Larry Cadloff - two of our NetBackup experts. I will sadly be traveling overseas but if it's not at a crazy hour of the night I may listen in. You should definitely attend though. Definitely.
When? Wednesday December 10th at 11:00am pacific
What? Protecting Microsoft SQL Server with NetBackup
So you are barely meeting your backup window and now you have decided to replace your old LTO2 drives with faster LTO3 drives, or wait, LTO4 is available. Yeah, let’s go with those. After replacing your 8 old drives with 8 new ones you are ready to relax and watch things run. Why is the phone ringing at 2 AM? Why are backups not finishing within the backup window? Why are things worse? Too many people assume the tape drive is automatically the bottleneck in their backup environment without making sure that is the case. Too many people assume there are only two places to worry about performance, the tape drive and the media server bptm buffers. While these are two places to be concerned about they are not by any way, shape or form the only two places. In fact in today’s backup infrastructure they aren’t necessarily the first place to look. If you will bear with me I would like...
Today I have the pleasure of interviewing Saradhi Sreegiriraju, a Product Manager from Data Domain. Data Domain is a partner in our OpenStorage initiative. If you aren't familiar with OpenStorage you can read all about it in section 3.5 of this Symantec whitepaper on "NetBackup Disk Based Data Protection".
Q. Tell us a little more about yourself. How long have you been with Data Domain and what is your role there?
A. I’m the Product Manager at Data Domain for the NetBackup OpenStorage product. I also have Product Management responsibilities for our System Management and Quality of Service products. I’ve been with Data Domain for the past 22 months and prior to that I was with NetApp and Fujitsu.
Once you're running VMware, new VMs pop up like moles in the game, "Whack-A-Mole." And kind of like the moles, many of the VMs are identical, because they were all cloned from the same gold image. What does that mean from a backup perspective? It means that you're backing up the contents of that same gold image over and over again. These duplicate copies take up a lot of space, and your CFO, if he is savvy enough about data center technologies, will beg you to install some deduplication software (like PureDisk), which will cut your IT expenses dramatically.
Why? Two reasons. First, with PureDisk, you'll only backup one copy of each unique block, rather than multiple copies. The savings on storage from doing this are incredible - we've seen as high as 99%. Next, PureDisk puts less of a load on your ESX server than a traditional client inside the Guest VM does. What does that mean? Lower load per VM per ESX Server means you can put more VMs on each ESx...
If you have been reading storage blogs lately you have heard about EMC's Atmos annoucement. I won't comment much on the platform, there are enough pundits doing that. There is one simple inescapable fact, storage devices and storage software that allow one to create simple and clear policies for what needs to be done are in demand now and will be in even greater demand in the future.
NetBackup’s Storage Lifecycle Policies are a great example of this. Combining this capability with Open Storage seems to have even convinced at least one of the backup industry's most trusted raconteurs.
To poke a little fun, I have to admit that I knew I had heard the name Atmos before but I couldn’t remember where. It was late Sunday night...
We already have 87 customer production days on NetBackup and 145 days of customers running in a test configuration. Days are racking up quickly as more customers continue install it. Here's a couple of customer quotes.
Last Wednesday I scraped frost and snow off my windshield and headed for the airport and ultimately the Atlantis Resort in Nassau, Bahamas. When you live in Minnesota and winter has already arrived, stepping off a plane in a hot place in the tropics always feels like magic.
I was at the Atlantis as part of an annual event Symantec throws to honor the people who have filed patents, been awarded patents or have driven significant innovation. As a bonus you also get to bring a guest – which is a pretty nice perk if you were thinking about joining Symantec. The events were fun and it was also a great opportunity to meet with my colleagues from around the globe face to face.
Larry, our expert technical product manager for all things Windows let me know this today: Due to popular demand we have released a technote (305549) that summarizes and clarifies the steps needed to configure the NetBackup 6.5.2/6.5.3 Sharepoint agent for granular recovery of Sharepoint 2003/2007 documents. Think of it as a “cheat sheet” that brings together information from several different manuals in one convenient location. You can find the technote at http://support.veritas.com/docs/305549. On a related note, if you are using NetBackup 6.5.2 or 6.5.2a, you should also have a look at the 6.5.2 Late Breaking News technote at http://support.veritas.com/docs/307880. This document lists a number of known problems with NetBackup 6.5.2 and includes links to other technotes that discuss each issue. All of the hotfixes associated with...
George Crump recently wrote a post on Byte & Switch on source-side deduplication. I thought an expansion on the topic would be useful given that George did not cover all the facts in his post. Yes, I’m writing from a Symantec perspective, but my intention is to present a balanced and factual argument.
Do you have to switch backup applications for integrateddeduplication? NetBackup integrated its PureDisk deduplication engine into the NetBackup server to give customer the choice about how and where they perform deduplication. As a result, there’s no need to replace the client on your existing machine if you’re already using NetBackup.
But why would you do such a thing?? You'd have to be really frickin' stupid to burn dollar bills to light a fire!!
Yeah, I knew you'd agree with that. Fortunately, NetBackup customers are smarter than the average bear (or, let's say, the average backup administrator). NetBackup customers know that backing up ESX servers twice (once for the VM image, once for all the individual files) is like burning dollar bills, and additionally, backing up without using incrementals is like throwing a few twenties on top.
Let's explore the incrementals angle a bit. NetBackup 6.5.2 is the only backup product available that supports incremental backups with VCB. How does this work? Using VCB at the VMDK level, a full image is backed up initially, and then catalogued on the proxy server. Subsequently, incremental backups are performed by comparing the contents of a VM against the stored catalog of the initial full image. If changes are detected, then VCB is...
