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
Addressing use cases of backup systems for enterprises
The next step after you have analyzed your backup requirements is to start identifying the components that together will design your backup system. While designing a complete and efficient backup system you will also need to identify the core pain points that dictate the choices you make in selecting each component. For example, you are required to backup growing number of clients with large data sets, in this case your pain point would be to ensure that the backup solution you consider can account for expandable storage options
Some of the common pain points that you may come across have been listed below:
Choosing the right hardware, operating system, mandated IT application, and the backup software. Each of these come in multiple variables and increased interoperability challenges like dealing with too many vendors for maintenance.
Choosing tapes only for long-term retention.
Choosing the right Disk storage, as each type as its individual pain points:
DAS (Direct-attached storage) requires additional hardware and file system maintenance.
SAN (Storage area network) brings more complexity and operational costs.
NAS (Network-attached storage) taxes the network.
Choosing the right solutions to backup clients with large data sets. Large data sets means multiple challenges in dealing with:
Large databases and application servers
Large NAS Filers
Slow networks thus requiring to create a dedicated backup network
Unsuccessful scheduled full backups due to issues like exceeded backup window.
Choosing Virtual Machine (VM) protection to address concerns over:
Resource constraints
VM sprawl (when the number of VMs increases over time, simply because of the ease of creating them and not because all of them are absolutely necessary for the business)
Contrasting deduplication pools
Table: Use cases with possible solutions evaluates each of the above pain points as a separate use case and identifies solutions to address them.
Table: Use cases with possible solutions
Pain Point | Possible Solutions using Veritas NetBackup Appliance |
|---|---|
Dealing with slow Networks | Multiple connectivity options can be considered:
|
Dealing with clients containing large data sets | The power to scale-out in multiple dimensions using:
|
Dealing with issues of backing up clients with large data sets - SAN Client | Protecting clients with large data set - SAN Client
|
Accommodating backups of storage filers like NetApp and EMC | Protecting NetApp and EMC Filers
|
Achieving high deduplication rates | Intelligent deduplication Stream Handlers for high deduplication rates The NetBackupAccelerator is used to perform efficient scan of all files and send only changed segments to the appliance during each full backup. The operations necessary to generate full backup are performed on the appliance and primary server in the background. Thus the full backup is deduplicated by using lesser MSDP storage space. |
Accommodating traditional file servers | Protecting traditional file servers and NAS using optimized synthetics, accelerator and client-side deduplication
|
Adapting to VMware requirements | With NetBackup appliance direct vSphere Backup can be achieved due to the VMware backup host built into NetBackup 52xx Appliances.
For more information, refer to the 'About the NetBackup appliance as a VMware backup host' section in the NetBackup™ Appliance Administrator's Guide. |