optimal configuration with NetApp & SAN??

[databoy26]

Hello,
I have some questions about a future implementation. We currently back up about 4 tb's a day from a netapp r150 and r200 using NDMP (4 scsi connections per netapp). We also back up about 175 win/unix/linux clients over our network. Our current configuration is fairly stable and I am pretty happy with our speeds. Our biggest limitation is how much I/O we can push through our NetApp heads(seems to be between 90 and 120meg a second now). We are talking about adding a SAN in the next year or so and we are trying to work out our backup strategy. The way we are heading it looks like we will use one library and attach everything via fiber channel and share drives between the NetApp's and our SAN(vendor TBD). I have no experience with fibre channel, and I am really not sure if we will see faster speeds going fiber channel vs direct attached ndmpd(scsi).

Does anyone have a similar situation or any advice here?


Thanks

 

[605]

I have no practical experience either, but there is one fact that you can not ignore: If you use the same (number of) drives, you will not see any change at all. The reason is simple - the drives will be the bottleneck. If you can keep them streaming today, it does not matter which transfer path you are using. So adding a SAN will not improve anything.