Question about setting up volume pools

[djohle]

[Long post warning]

I am fairly new to NetBackup, and like most people, am diving in head first out of necessity.

I am pretty familiar with the NetBackup concepts (Groups/Pools/Classes/Policies/etc.), but I need some guidance on how to put it all together. I need help mainly with respect to guideliness for allocating media to volume pools and maybe some suggestions on policies as well.

What I have is a "simple configuration" compared to some examples I've seen, which makes it hard to apply them to my situation.

There is 1 NBU server directly connected to a 15 slot robot with a single AIT2 drive. There are about 5 Solaris clients that I'm starting off with, and will be adding another 5 or so clients (various OSes) later on. I have 60 volumes (50GB tapes) in my media library, currently in the "None" volume pool.

The client purposes vary: firewall, web server, application server, and Oracle server.

My first thought is that, depending on the client, the frequency & type of backups will vary--such as more frequent for Oracle and less frequent for the firewall.

I have read that it's best to match volumes in a pool based on retention levels, which could lead to some complication with the variety of clients/policies. So I'm thinking that I should try to simplify/consolidate the clients into fewer schedules.

Given 60 tapes & 15 slots, there are 4 groups in rotation (library, vault, offsite1, offsite2). I am considering a simple weekly full + daily incremental routine with 1 month retentions, and rotate through the groups weekly. I could then create only two pools (larger one for full & smaller one for incr) spread equally across the 4 groups (and maybe take away one from each group for a scratch pool?).

Does this sound like a sane solution?

 

[johnny99]

What you write sounds ok to me.

It depends a lot on what kind of data you have and what the recovery needs are.

I don't understand why you need vault and offsite1+2.

We basicly use onsite and offsite (our names)

/johnny

 

[djohle]

4 groups because there are 4 sets of tapes in the rotation. The original plan was to rotate them weekly through physical 4 locations (2 local, 2 off site). They could always be done in pairs resulting in 2 groups, and this can be changed at any time.

Since the original post I've gone ahead set up weekly full & daily incremental backups. There are three pools (full, incr, scratch) spanning the 4 tape sets.

It seems to be working out pretty well now, including some test restores.

 

[Saulis]

Netbackup seperates them automatically for you (retention levels) by the type of backup that it is, unless you specify the retention level yourself. That way, the incrementals should not go on to the same tape as the full's. The best way to set policies is to make sure that each policy has its own set of incremental as well as full backups for whatever files you want to backup. This way you can make sure that all your policies have a current as well as a full done on them