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Contents
1.0
1.1
1.2
1.3
1.4
1.5
1.6
2.0
INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................. 1
ADDITIONAL READING .......................................................................................................... 1
PERFORMANCE PARAMETERS FOR CONFIGURING THE SAN CLIENT ....................................... 2
SAN INTERCONNECT ........................................................................................................... 2
SAN CLIENT SCALABILITY AND ZONING BEST PRACTICES....................................................... 2
MEDIA SERVER PROFILE ...................................................................................................... 3
CLIENT PROFILE .................................................................................................................. 4
BEST PRACTICES .............................................................................................................. 6
2.1
SEGREGATED FT MEDIA SERVERS ....................................................................................... 6
2.2
COMBINED FT/LAN MEDIA SERVERS ................................................................................... 7
2.3
MULTI-STREAMING BACKUP ................................................................................................. 8
2.3.1
Stream distribution ..................................................................................................... 8
2.3.2
Connection restrictions on the FT Media Server ....................................................... 8
2.3.3
Increasing the maximum target ports available to a SAN Client ............................... 9
2.3.4
Increasing the number of SAN clients per target port................................................ 9
1.0 Introduction
In todays 24/7 business environment, corporations are looking for ways to protect their data
without disrupting business operations. This eliminates the options of using the LAN during of
peak hours to backup and protect the data.
The NetBackup SAN Client feature takes advantage of Fiber Channel Storage Area Network
(SAN) connections to perform a fast backup of a client machine directly to a Media Server,
moving data transfers off the LAN and away from conflicting traffic. The SAN Client provides a
high performance data transfer for the client and offloads the LAN with the backup traffic.
The primary purpose of the SAN Client is to back up large applications and file systems faster
and more efficiently than is possible using LAN based backup or locally attached backup devices
(a SAN Media Server). However the SAN Client architecture does not allow the same degrees of
parallel backup operation as the alternative approaches and is therefore less suited to handling
large numbers of small backup jobs. As a general rule SAN Client should be deployed selectively
on servers where the data volumes are such that LAN backup within a reasonable time period is
impractical it should not be deployed with a very large number of clients with a wide range
of backup sizes and a small number of FT Media Servers target ports (grouped together) as this
may lead to excessive resource contention on the FT Media Servers when there is a wide range
of job sizes.
This document describes the NetBackup SAN Client feature and provides some information on
performance considerations and best practices when deploy the SAN Client. The document is
intended to provide backup administrators with the necessary information to help our customers
take full advantage of this advanced feature and maximize their ROI.
NetBackup Device Configuration Guide (OS specific configuration steps for SAN Clients):
http://www.symantec.com/docs/DOC5332
Symantec recommends a maximum of 30 SAN Client initiator ports zoned with a Fibre Transport
target port because of the effective queue depth of about 60 for a QLogic hardware/firmware
target port. Because the NetBackup Fibre Transport media server will simulate two "pseudo tape
devices" on each Fibre Transport target port, the number of commands arriving will be two times
the number of initiators. Keeping the number of SAN Clients per port at 30 or below prevents
each target port from having to queue more than 60 low-level fibre channel commands at any
point in time.
Limiting the number of initiator ports for each target port to 30 will prevent the queue from being
overflowed. With more than 30 clients per port there is risk that the Fibre Transport Media Server
will not respond to a SCSI inquiry. This could have undesirable results on the client operating
system during boot or device discovery.
While all inclusive zoning is supported for SAN Client configurations, it is not recommended. An
all inclusive zone runs a risk of a single miss-configured client or server affecting all the other
SAN Clients in the zone.
Only two ports are fully loaded with Fibre Transport traffic at the same time.
6) Use a system test tool (like dd) to make sure the backend disk can write as fast as
the expected FT transfer speed. For example, if you expect to transfer an aggregate
of 600 MB/s over 8 streams, verify that your disk can sustain at least 600 MB/s rate
using 8 streams with 256k blocks.
7) Finally, a multi-processor system is required. While the actual CPU utilization for
Fiber Transport streams is small, keeping the interrupt latency low is required to
maintain high transfer rates. This requires a minimum of two CPU. An x86_64
based system that has a constant 600 MB/s of Fiber Transport data will utilize
about 50% of a dual core 3 GHz processor. A very general rule of thumb would be
that there should be at least 5 MHz of CPU speed for every 1 MB/s of data transfer.
8)
Expect the performance of target mode 4 and 8 Gbit/s FC to be similar because the
latency of processing each transfer command at both the client and media server end
is a significant portion of the transport time. 8 Gbit/s FC target ports can only provide
a higher per port aggregate transfer rate when more client ports are concurrently in
use and you should not count on this occurring in practice.
jobs such that one or more of them fail to start early enough to allow them to complete within the
backup window.
40
Symantec recommends that you use 32 or fewer
connections concurrently on Linux.
On Linux hosts, you can increase that maximum
by setting a NetBackup touch file,
NUMBER_DATA_BUFFERS_FT.
40
40
64
It is also important to remember that each port used by a specific client impacts the performance
of other SAN Clients utilizing the same Media Server. If two SAN Clients utilize the same Media
Server with only four target ports, and each client claims all four of those ports, the clients will
contend for those ports. The effect of this contention is that the client with a lower latency will
'win' and transfer data faster than the higher latency client, sometimes as much as twice as fast.
If each client had only claimed two ports, they would have been able to share the available ports
and not run into contention issues.
The key to tuning is therefore to limit the number of ports used by a SAN Client while maximizing
the number of streams on each port but ensuring that the maximum number of connections
across all the available ports does not exceed the maximum.