Serverlesss backup with EVA4000, MSL6030 and Backup Exec??

[jfk8680]

Hello,

I am fairly new to SAN environments so forgive me for possibly asking for the obvious:

We have an EVA4000 SAN with HSV200 controllers, Cisco MDS 9020 fabric switches, a MSL6030 tape library and class-c blades in a c7000 enclosure. We are using Backup Exec 11d to perform backups of our servers. For as far as I can tell the tape library is connected to the fabric using two NSR e1200-320 interfaces but I don't think we are using them optimally at the moment. There are Backup Exec Remote Agents installed on all the servers and it looks like we are backing up the servers over our LAN (through the remote agent) and then the Backup Exec server processes the data and writes it to tape. Now I have read some stuff about serverless backup and native FC backup but I'm not sure if these technologies are possible with our setup and if so, how to implement them...

If I'm correct, we would gain a large backup performance increase by implementing a serverless backup, directly over the SAN fabric, right?

Could some please explain how this kind of backup works (or possibly point me to an existing document or thread?) and some quick pointers on how to proceed??

Thanks!

Jeffrey


Jeffrey Kusters
MCSA, MCSE, CCNA, CCNP

 

[steveot]

I think you refering to ADBO Advanced disk base option or off host backups. If that is the case you would need the hardware (VSS) provider to support that.

http://download1.veritas.com/support/products/Backup_Exec_for_WindowsNT/282249.pdf

From your setup what you have described backup exec is functioning by design and yes..they server are backing up thru the lan. If you wanted the servers to be a fiber to fiber backup then you would need to install a full copy of backup exec on the server directly (assuming the remote server have Fiber cards) and use the SAN/SSO option.

 

[hmallett]

What you are referring to is ServerFree backup. This was an option in previous versions of BE, but it was removed for BE11d. Off Host backup and SSO are possible other solutions.

http://www.BackupExecFAQ.com