Veritas NetBackup™ Appliance Capacity Planning and Performance Tuning Guide
- About this Guide
- Section I. Capacity planning
- Section II. Best Practices
- Section III. Performance tuning
- Section IV. Quick reference to Capacity planning and Performance tuning
When should the backup take place?
To correctly size and configure your backup solution, you must decide on the type and frequency of your backups. When considering a backup schedule you need to consider the following checks:
Table: Schedule a backup
Checks to be performed | Additional comments |
|---|---|
Will you perform daily-incremental backups? | The size calculation and deduplication ratio for taking full backups differ from the size calculation and deduplication ratio required for an incremental backup. |
When will you perform a full backup?
| When you determine this information helps in calculating the storage capacity requirements for over longer period of time. The size calculation and deduplication ratio for taking full backups differ from the size calculation and deduplication ratio required for an incremental backup. |
How many jobs will be run per day? | Considering that it takes 2 seconds / 3 seconds per job, it means that approximately ~15000 jobs per backup window (1000 per hour) are run. If the job count exceeds the 2-second or 3-second rule, you may need to consider increasing the backup window or setup a new domain. Also, the number of jobs is limited by the total number of streams that appliance can take and also on the total throughput of the deduplication storage on the appliance. |
What is the window of time that is available to complete each backup? | The length of a window dictates several aspects of your backup strategy. For example, you may want a larger window of time to back up multiple, high-capacity servers. |
Would you want to configure a deduplication solution to take backups? | In some scenarios you may want to only use AdvancedDisk for backup. An AdvancedDisk is the normal disk backup, performed without any deduplication. Deciding on whether you want to configure a deduplication solution can help you opt for a mix of MSDP and AdvancedDisk. |
Would you want to consider using the advanced NetBackup features such as NetBackup accelerator? | NetBackup Accelerator uses a platform and file system independent track log to intelligently detect changed files and send the changed segments from those files to media server. These changed segments are written to a supported storage pool in the NetBackup Appliance. Although the primary benefit from NetBackup Accelerator is for performing full backups, it also reduces a subset of costs in running incremental backups. |
Would you be adopting NDMP to perform backups? | The NDMP (Network Data Management Protocol) is used along with NetBackup Accelerator to perform backup and recovery. The NetBackup Appliance supports NDMP stream handlers for EMC Celerra and NetApp which results in very high deduplication rate. Using Accelerator we can protect shares as mounted file systems. However, this is not a comprehensive backup of filers. |
Do you plan to run an Off-site backup or Local backup? | The backup schedule is greatly affected if the backup is run locally or is transferred to an off-site location. The time to transfer a local backup to the off-site location will need to be estimated and considered at the time of scheduling a backup. |
Is the computer system local or remote? | Determining the total number of systems that are local or remote can help determine the backup cycles. |
Do you want to allow the users to run the backups and restores for their computer systems? | This can help to reduce the time it takes to initiate certain operations. However, user-directed operations can also result in higher support costs and the loss of flexibility in storage allocation and usage for backups. User-directed operations can monopolize media and tape drives when you most need them. They can also generate more support calls and training issues while the users become familiar with the new backup system. |
Do you plan to back up any system over a network? | Identify the type of networks you plan to use for scheduling backups. Based on the amount of data that you want to back up and the frequency of those backups, you can also consider installing a private network for taking backups. Identifying this information can help you account for the time required to perform the backups over a network and select the best time period when the backup should be taken Note: It is recommended that you use SAN Client and dedicated HBA on the NetBackup client for taking backups. |
What is your policy for backup expiration? | Identify the backup expiration time period for each of your policies, thus determining the possible restore options. For example, one of the commonly adopted policies is to expire your incremental backups after 2 weeks or 1 month and your full backups after 6 months. With this policy, you can restore any daily file change from the previous weeks or month and restore data from full backups for the previous 6 months |