Windows Master/media server max throughput 2

[ColG2k7]

Hi.
Wonder if anyone can shed some light on this:

We currently have a Very powerful DL580 with 8gb ram and 4 3.2ghz Xeon cpus running win server 2003 and NBU6 MP4.
It is running 2x1gbit switch load balanced network cards and currently has 4 LTO1 drives in a MSL5000 tape library, each drive running off its own HBA

Ive heard that windows isnt really the platform to use for out and out backup throughput from a network to tapedrives/storage. Is this the case? what kind of speeds will a windows server top out at??

The reson i ask is that we were planning an upgrade to LTO3 drives for the capacity and performance increase, but have since been told that a windows server would struggle to support the throughput to keep 4 drives streaming.

Is there any easy way to see what the overall throughput of the system is when NBU is running full tilt? ive tried unscientifically adding up the KB/S of all the running jobs at one time, and that hovers around 70mb/s (4x4multiplexed)

Ta

 

[Stumpr]

Please read the pdf

Veritas NetBackup (tm) Enterprise Server / Server 6.0 Backup Planning and Performance Tuning Guide for UNIX, Windows, and Linux.

http://ftp.support.veritas.com/pub/support/products/NetBackup_Enterprise_Server/281842.pdf

Bob Stump
VERITAS - "Ain't it the truth?"

 

[335iGuy]

hope this helps !

Ive heard that windows isnt really the platform to use for out and out backup throughput from a network to tapedrives/storage. Is this the case?

I've heard this too, but havent seen side by side comparisons

what kind of speeds will a windows server top out at??

Depends on the Bus, we're running a DL580 w/4GB of ram with 2 LTO2's and 4 LTO4's.

The reson i ask is that we were planning an upgrade to LTO3 drives for the capacity and performance increase, but have since been told that a windows server would struggle to support the throughput to keep 4 drives streaming.

BS. the 580 will handle it fine. please note like the above posted mentioned you will need to tweak the buffer settings all over the place.

Is there any easy way to see what the overall throughput of the system is when NBU is running full tilt? ive tried unscientifically adding up the KB/S of all the running jobs at one time, and that hovers around 70mb/s (4x4multiplexed)

Total thruput no. Maximum drive performance yes, theres a netbackup cmdline test... sorry i dont have that info ATM.

our setup 1 DL580 , 2 2950's, 1 6850. 16 drives (6 lto4, 3 lto3, 4 lto4, 3 lto1 drives. When i spoke with veritas (onsite) and discussed the 6850 media server they responded by saying it could barely handle 1 drive yada yada yada. this was complete BS and was proven wrong.

Please note when your dealing with drives that can run 100+MBsec native you will need to have sufficient network pipe into the media server and sufficient pipe out to the drives. with our DL580 we've found the bandwidth in/out was fair however the processors are/were getting maxed out, sometimes causing retrys and 13's/14's. Our 6850 has 4 LTO4 drives attached like the DL580 and the it doesnt break a sweat.

I've found this info helpful when buiding our netbackup solution... determine how many drives per media server, add their maximum compressed thruput. ensure the scsi or fibre port are split accordingly not to exceed the max compressed thruput, ensure you have sufficient NICs added for teaming to meet the MAX compressed performance of the total drives, ensure you have around 300MB RAM for each drive, review the server bus and seperate the cards to spread the thruput.

I estimated we needed around 1800MBs server bus performance, I know the 580 didnt have that and was able to meet this with the 6850 (having multiple). Obviously an old server that has 667Mhz bus or slower will not support multiple drives.

Good luck !

if you need help with the settings let me know