[BBLISA] Recommendation for NAS appliance?

[K. M. Peterson]

My $0.02 ...

On 05Mar10, at 00:50 , Edward Ned Harvey wrote:

> To answer your question, we paid for Netbackup, so that's the tool that
> writes our tapes.  I understand Amanda or bacula would be viable
> alternatives for less than thousands of dollars, but I've not tried them.

We had an S500 "StoreVault" that began to show signs of deteriorating performance during backup, which helped us correlate transient issues reported by users.

This ~4TB unit turned out to have 25 million files on it, which seemed to, ahem, explain most of those problems.

We were using Bacula, writing to DLT-S4 tape. Generally, we would see a maximum of 24MB/sec throughput to tape - this was using a Bacula job that took the output of the filer 'dump' program, piped via rsh, and included encryption performed on the backup server and then writing to tape.  We used this dump approach for "CIFS-Native" filesystems on the StoreVault in order to preserve as much of the Windows metadata as possible; the rest were done via NFS mounts.  Amen on the issues with large deleted files and snapshots, but I was too late setting up quotas (for numbers of files, not space usage) to prevent a meltdown.  Although it's intuitively obvious to people that one can't fit 50GB of data on a 25GB disk, sometimes it's difficult to convince them that too many files in a filesystem cause issues.

All conventional Bacula clients had encryption configured, so unless a filesystem was mounted on the server, everything coming off the client was secure.  This did not, of course, include the NetApp, where encryption was done on the Bacula server.

_KMP


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