Veritas NetBackup™ Appliance Capacity Planning and Performance Tuning Guide

Last Published:
Product(s): Appliances (3.0)
Platform: NetBackup Appliance OS
  1. About this Guide
    1.  
      About this guide
    2.  
      About the intended audience
    3.  
      About the NetBackup appliance documentation
  2. Section I. Capacity planning
    1. Analyzing your backup requirements
      1. Analyzing your backup requirements
        1.  
          What do you want to backup?
        2.  
          How much data do you want to back up?
        3.  
          When should the backup take place?
        4.  
          What is the retention period?
        5. Record your backup requirements
          1.  
            Template to record computer system information
          2.  
            Template to record database information
          3.  
            Template to record application server information
    2. Designing your backup system
      1.  
        Addressing use cases of backup systems for enterprises
      2.  
        Addressing use cases of backup systems for remote or branch offices
      3. About NetBackup appliances
        1.  
          About the Master Server role
        2.  
          About the Media Server role
      4. Selecting new appliances
        1.  
          Selecting a media server
        2.  
          Selecting a master server
  3. Section II. Best Practices
    1. About the best practices section
      1.  
        About best practices
      2.  
        References to maintenance sites
    2. About implementing deduplication solutions
      1.  
        About implementing deduplication solutions
      2.  
        General recommendations
      3.  
        Oracle
      4.  
        Microsoft SQL
      5.  
        DB2
      6.  
        Sybase
      7.  
        Lotus Notes
    3. Network consideration
      1.  
        About network considerations
      2.  
        About Fibre Channel connectivity
      3. About SAN zone configurations
        1.  
          About zoning the SAN for NetBackup appliances
      4.  
        Validating network bandwidth
    4. Storage configuration
      1.  
        About storage configuration
      2. About configuring a shared storage pool
        1.  
          Calculating the basic stream count for backups
      3. About moving a storage partition for better performance
        1. Moving a partition
          1.  
            Move <partition> dialog
        2.  
          Moving a partition using the NetBackup Appliance Shell Menu
        3.  
          Moving the MSDP partition from a base disk to an expansion disk for optimum performance
    5. Generic best practices
      1.  
        Generic best practices
      2.  
        About Notification settings
      3.  
        About IPMI configuration
      4.  
        Disaster recovery best practices
      5.  
        Job performance
      6.  
        Architecture
      7.  
        NetBackup Catalog Backup
      8.  
        Patching with the SLP (storage lifecycle policies)
      9.  
        VMware backups using appliances
      10.  
        Improving NetBackup Appliance restore performance
  4. Section III. Performance tuning
    1. Role-based Performance Monitoring
      1.  
        Role-based configuration as a factor affecting performance
      2.  
        What affects the performance of a Master Server?
      3.  
        What affects the performance of a media server (MSDP)?
    2. Optimize network settings and improve performance
      1.  
        Optimize network settings and improve performance
      2.  
        SAN Fiber Channel setup
      3.  
        Network bonding
      4.  
        VMware VADP
      5.  
        Jumbo frame implementation for increased MTU
    3. Storage configurations
      1.  
        Storage configurations
      2.  
        Deduplication disk I/O and RAID level settings
      3. RAID Controller operations
        1.  
          RAID Controller commands
      4.  
        Deduplication load balancing
      5.  
        Storage Lifecycle Policies
      6.  
        Auto Image Replication (AIR)
      7.  
        AdvancedDisk settings
      8.  
        Tape Out operations
    4. NetBackup Appliance tuning procedures and performance monitoring
      1. About diagnosing performance issues
        1.  
          About CPU monitoring and tuning
        2.  
          About memory monitoring and tuning
        3.  
          About network monitoring and tuning
        4.  
          About I/O monitoring and tuning
        5.  
          General guidelines to spot a resource bottleneck
      2. About performance tuning practices
        1.  
          About I/O performance tuning
        2.  
          About Oracle backup and restore performance tuning
        3.  
          Setting NET_BUFFER_SZ to 0 on the NetBackup client for better WAN Optimization performance
      3. About tuning procedures and performance monitoring
        1. NetBackup Client performance
          1.  
            Using nbperfchk to validate disk performance on NetBackup Appliances
        2.  
          Other Performance Monitoring commands
  5. Section IV. Quick reference to Capacity planning and Performance tuning
    1. Capacity Planning checklist
      1.  
        Checklist for Capacity planning
      2.  
        Capacity measuring worksheet
    2. Best practices checklist
      1.  
        Best practices checklist
    3. How to monitor the performance of your appliance
      1.  
        About monitoring the performance of your appliance
      2.  
        Performance Monitoring matrix

How much data do you want to back up?

When calculating the total amount of data to be backed up consider the current requirements and the expected growth in the data in the near future. Table: Calculating the amount of data to be backed up lists the considerations to be made for calculating the amount of data to be backed up.

Table: Calculating the amount of data to be backed up

Checks to calculate the amount of data to be backed up

Additional comments

Have you computed the total disk space on each individual system?

  • Calculate the total disk space for each individual system, along with the space used for databases.

  • Identify the total number of files to be backed up on each system.

  • Calculate the amount of disk space used by a computer system on their disk drives, shared drives, and so on.

  • You can use the calculated total size to analyze the potential growth of your system to ensure that your current backup solution accommodates the growth in backup requirements

  • Perform thorough analysis of the data being protected for at-least 30 days to get an understanding of data types, growth trends and change rates using the NetBackup Deployment Utility.

Have you identified and added all the data types included in the backup?

Ensure that you have identified and listed all the data types to be included in the backup. For example, does the data contain text, graphics, databases, and so on. Each data type contributes to a specific amount of data in your total backup requirement.

Some of the advantage of identifying the data types to be backed up are listed below:

  • Based on this classification you can identify the amount of data collected under each type, this calculated amount can help you compute the expected growth in data in the near future.

  • The other advantage of identifying data types can help you decide upon the relevance and priority of backing up a particular data type.

How compressible is the data?

Identify how much amount of data from your total capacity is compressible or not. Based on this information you can ascertain the amount of space to be allocated to backup data that is compressible and to data that is incompressible.

Will the data be encrypted?

Identify if you want to encrypt the data during backup. Based on the level of security applicable to the data being backed up this decision can be taken.

Note:

You will also need to consider the additional time encrypted backups may take. Based on which your backup schedules will get affected.

Have you added the space on mirrored disks only once?

Ensure that you consider the amount of data stored on these repositories only once, if you use storage replication or disk mirroring techniques.

Have you added the size of your database backups to your final calculations?

Ensure that you add the amount of data stored on all the database management systems maintained in your organization.

What are your data protection requirements?

Understand the data protection requirement for the data to be backed up, like the SLA, disaster recovery, and Backup retention and so on.

Have you added the requirements of the test-backup environment?

Create an independent test-backup environment to ensure that your production environment will work with the changed backup solutions. The test-backup environment helps to keep in study the effects of a new backup solution and of the changes made to the hardware and the software infrastructure over a period of time

Have you added any resulting growth factor to your total backup solution?

Identify the annual data growth factor to calculate capacity increase over years.

Have you computed the amount of data you will need to backup in the next six months to a few years from now?

Ensure that you have computed the growth in amount of data in the next six months to a few years. Based on the expected growth you can identify the strategy to expand your existing storage configurations, as required.

See When should the backup take place?.

More Information

Analyzing your backup requirements

When should the backup take place?

What is the retention period?