Image Level Agent?

[rdphill]

Commvault 6.1 SP4 all updates applied.

I have a situation with one server that has a massive amount of small files. Over 8 million. The scan phase alone takes 4-5 hours.

I have already made it a media agent for direct SAN backup and am achieving an average of 250Gb/hour throughput. It still doesn't meet our window.

I am researching the image level agent. This is new to me so any info would be greatly appreciated.

First, is it available for AIX PowerPC. If an image level backup is performed, can a file level restore be done?

Thanks
Rick

 

[birky]

Hi

1) Yes it's available for PowerPC with the following-

AIX 5.2 32-bit and 64-bit with technology level 10 and runtime library xlC.rte 8.0.0.0 or higher
AIX 5.3 32-bit and 64-bit with technology level 6 and runtime library xlC.rte 8.0.0.0 or higher

2) Yes file level restores can be done
(for AIX though the MediaAgent + client must be AIX)




Birky
CommVault Certified Engineer

 

[rdphill]

Thanks for your quick reply!

Just reading books online.

Can you tell me what agent I would purchase? I am reading about:

Image Level ProxyHost iDataAgent - UNIX

as well as

Overview - Image Level iDataAgent

Rick

 

[birky]

it depends on your requirements - I would get in touch with your account mgr

If you have so many files maybe you would be better off introducing DataArchiver for Unix and archiving a lot of old files off to secondary storage - would reduce your window and save storage costs





Birky
CommVault Certified Engineer

 

[Calippo]

Going for Image Level is certainly and obvious choice but its never a one size fits all.
I was recently working on a customer site where one system had over 6million files within about 80GB and another system with a couple of drives with 12million files.

Those two systems were high spec and we experimented with various scan methods (classic, Change Journal, DCE). The result was that in systems of this enormous scale of dense file systems the Change Journal scan was best choice although the scan took a while.

You don’t have to go Image Level, after all, there is no SIS support on Image Level.
Why not consider Synthetic Full backup regime.
That way you are only ever backing up incremental changes after your first initial full.
You could use SIS for space efficiency.
So scan may take a hour or so, you backup may only be several minutes or up to an hour depending on change rate.

In regards to migrating he files via DA, if you migrate and leave the stubs behind you still have the millions of files although less footprint. If you remove the stubs, which may be preferable you will then need to use “find” and recover you migrated files for your user if a user needs them.


---------------------------------------
EMCTA & EMCIE - Backup & Recovery
Legato & Commvault Certified Specialist
MCSE

 

[cabraun]

I am going to 2nd the idea of Synthetic Fulls. We have a similar server with some 12 million scanned images. Before doing synthetics, it would take 2.5 days to do a regular full backup. Now nightly incrementals take about 90 minutes, including scan time (avg data size backing up incrementally is 10-15GB per night) and the weekly synthetic full takes about 4 hours (320GB total size).