Veritas NetBackup™ Appliance Capacity Planning and Performance Tuning Guide
- About this Guide
- Section I. Capacity planning
- Analyzing your backup requirements
- Designing your backup system
- Section II. Best Practices
- Section III. Performance tuning
- Section IV. Quick reference to Capacity planning and Performance tuning
- Index
SAN Fibre Channel setup
NetBackup 52xx appliance can act as a powerful Fibre Transport media server ingesting data from SAN Client's using standard SAN Fibre Channel setup. From the performance perspective SAN Client provides one of the fastest methods to send data from NetBackup client to the appliance and presents a very resource-intensive workload on the appliance.
SAN Client can send data either to MSDP or AdvancedDisk on the appliance. Each of these destinations presents different workloads on appliance resources.
Table: Performance determinant with SAN Client setup
Implementation Type | Description | Guidelines |
|---|---|---|
SAN Client with MSDP implementation | You cannot implement a NetBackup client-based deduplication when SAN Client is used. | Media server deduplication mode is very resource-intensive on the appliance, especially on the CPU, and all guidelines for the Media server-based deduplication performance sizing apply in this scenario. In addition to the CPU workload caused by the deduplication process, the HBA itself presents additional load utilizing 5 Mhz of CPU clock cycles per every 1 MB/s of data throughput as a general rule of thumb. This load is significant and should be calculated as additional load on the appliance. Combined with Media server-based deduplication requirements, this will lower throughput calculation significantly based on how much bandwidth is used for the SAN Client data. |
SAN Client with AdvancedDisk implementation | AdvancedDisk workload primarily uses disk I/O resources of the appliance. | The amount of data sent to the AdvancedDisk on the appliance should not be more than the appliance disk I/O capability. When sizing for the AdvancedDisk and SAN Client, maximum disk I/O throughput of 600 MB/s should be considered as a conservative number. |
Careful planning has to be done during architecture and performance sizing operations to achieve maximum performance. The following measures can be taken in addition to improve performance using a SAN Fibre Channel setup:
Having additional HBA ports dedicated to FTMS will help with overcoming some limits on scaling (number of SAN Clients per port ) and redundancy (some customers require redundant connectivity), but for the performance sizing limitation is still ingestion capability of the appliance.
Best possible throughput of one SAN target port working in the 8 Gb SAN environment can reach 780 MB/s (1560 Mb/s for two FTMS ports in the target mode) when fully saturated. NetBackup 5230 and 5240 appliance have an advanced architecture and can handle more I/O bandwidth on the PCI bus.
OS used with the appliances is based on the Linux OS and all FTMS or SAN Client limitations on Linux apply, for example number of streams to buffer size ratio.
The number of FT streams on Linux and NetBackup Appliance is in direct relation with the buffer size and if the number of streams is increased the buffer size has to be reduced. Although it is possible to change the number of streams and reduce buffer size from the root prompt, deploying such a configuration in a production environment requires a support exception.