Impact on network performance

[milkweed]

We are trying to architect a disk to disk to tape backup solution and have been evaluating Retrospect 7.0 for Windows. We want to backup approximately 1000 workstations to a single server attached to a SAN. The server would run 8 backup sets simultaneously, each to a different drive letter mapped to the SAN. After the initial full backups to the SAN, which would be staged over several weeks/months, we would only run incremental backups and do "synthetic full" backups to tape on a weekly or possibly monthly basis.

 

Has anyone else setup Retrospect in a D2D2T environment? If so, what type of impact has it had on the network? We are running all Cisco gear (Cat 6500's at core and distribution, 2950's at access layer) with a Gig backbone. Are there any recommendations for setting up the clients (i.e. bandwidth throttling) when running 8 simultaneous streams to a single server (probably attached to the network at 100Mbps, though possibly at 1Gbps)?

 

Finally, we realize mileage will vary, but how much disk space/client should we have available on the SAN. Obviously, this is very specific to a computing environment, but if anyone has input based on their experience we would appreciate it.

 

Thanks!