NetBackup 5.1 Disk Staging with EMC Clarion NAS? 1

[dukbtr]

Hello,

We are currently using:
5.1 HP-UX Master and Media
NDMP for NAS
LTO 1 (STK L700) and DLT 7000 (STK 9710)
Unix, Linux, Windows clients

We would like to go to disk staging some backups. We are to get some space on our NAS, but I'm wondering if this will even work. The NAS is from EMC using DART and is currently 5tb in size. Most of the information I have found refers to most companies using a SAN instead of NAS for D2D.

From what I have read, a NAS would not be the best way to go for our environment. I was just wondering if this is true and if not is anybody currently doing this?

From my reads and conversations with other Admins the NAS would be to slow for D2D because of the overhead of the NAS. The NAS is a media server with a direct attached drive using NDMP. Is this also an issue? We would be getting about 1tb of disk for storage.

Also it looks as though that MP4 fixed some issues with D2D, as far as cleanup. Has anybody else gone through this?

Thanks in advance,
Dukbtr

 

[comtec17]

NAS is definitly a "NO, NO" for disk staging. This is due to the performance you will not be able to recieve on Network Attached.

The best practice when using disk staging is to create a volume for each type of backup you will be doing. For example, a Disk Staging area on an independent set of spindles for fulls, and another set for differentials.

This is due to the nature of expiring images.

Also note that backups are sequential in nature, thus using a CIFS/NFS device, you cannot control the RAID emulation and would probably suffer from RAID 5 performance due to writes.