benfeea1 Posted January 13, 2008 Report Share Posted January 13, 2008 I am looking for some suggestions for a large Retrospect deployment. Here is the equipment I have to work with and the environment. Backup Servers - 2 HP Prolient servers. Each with 2 - 3 Ghz Xeon processors. 6 GB RAM - More RAM is coming if needed. Storage - Each server has a fiber connected RAID. Approximately 14 TB each. It can be sliced up however it is needed. No tape drives. We are going to backup direct to disk. Software - Retrospect 7.5.387 (latest) Multi Server. Unlimited clients and User Initiated Restore licenses. Clients - 400+ Macs running 10.4.x. PPC and Intel. They all have the latest Retrospect client. Network - The network is large. 50+ VLANs covering the campus, organized geographically by building/floor. I.E. Building 1 floor 1 VLAN, Building 17 floor 3... My thoughts - I have already discovered and added all the clients. They are organized alphabetically by hostname on the servers. I want to use Proactive Backups. I want to use about 6 backup streams, leaving 2 streams for UIR (User Initiated Restores). I want to go direct to disk. 28TB, 14TB on each server, sounds like a lot of storage. But I know it won't last forever. Questions - If I use multiple backup sets to allow for multiple streams, how should I organize the storage? One large volume, or a partition for each backup set? The advantage of putting all my backup sets on one volume as opposed to multiple partitions is that balancing the size is easier. How well does grooming work on very large backup sets? I tried it before on a set over 1TB, and it never seemed to work well. Overall I think I have the hardware to handle this. The network is fast enough. I'm just wondering what to do about the backup sets. Does grooming work well enough that my drives won't fill up after 2 months, and if they do will Retrospect groom out the older data? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mayoff Posted January 13, 2008 Report Share Posted January 13, 2008 You can use one big volume or partitions, it won't matter if the hardware can handle multiple data streams without speed loss. Groom works okay with backup sets in the 1 to 2 TB range, when you get much larger then this I think you will find the need to do more frequent catalog rebuilds. The more backup segments you have in the set, the greater chance for grooming failure. It should always work after the catalog rebuild. I typically groom once a month or so, and grooming works in most cases, but sometimes I have to do a catalog rebuild and run it again. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
benfeea1 Posted January 14, 2008 Author Report Share Posted January 14, 2008 After reading some other threads about grooming, I am going to stay away from it. It looks like It would take well over 24 hours to groom each backup set. I think I will rotate through two backup sets and just recycle them after two months or so. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mauricev Posted January 21, 2008 Report Share Posted January 21, 2008 Quote: No tape drives. We are going to backup direct to disk. What happens if a RAID controller goes berzerk and writes gibberish onto the disks? That actually can happen! What happens if there is a fire in the server room? Quote: If I use multiple backup sets to allow for multiple streams, how should I organize the storage? One large volume, or a partition for each backup set? I suggest using a single volume. You can't know how much space each disk set will need. You could end up with under and over-utilized partitions. With one volume, each backup set can take full advantage of all the available space. Quote: How well does grooming work on very large backup sets? I tried it before on a set over 1TB, and it never seemed to work well. In my experience, grooming does work well regardless of the backup set's size. Retrospect crashes; it doesn't happen that frequently, but it is frequent enough. When it does, it will often corrupt catalog files. This will usually be obvious and you will need to rebuild. But I believe that it may also subtly corrupt catalog files and that is what causes grooming to fail unexpectedly. Rebuilding the catalog is then required to fix the catalog and allow grooming to work again. Quote: I think I will rotate through two backup sets and just recycle them after two months or so. So where does your data go? There is no permanent archive? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mauricev Posted January 22, 2008 Report Share Posted January 22, 2008 Another thing to consider is that if you regularly start fresh, you lose the ability to do restore what you just erased; you lose the moving window of backups and I suspect it will take a long while to do the initial backup each time. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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