Re: How's amanda feeling these days?

Am 16.11.20 um 14:25 schrieb Dave Sherohman:
> Hello, again!
> 
> You may recall my earlier question to the list, included below.  I've
> now talked with my other coworkers who work with servers and they've
> agreed to go with amanda for our new backup system.
> 
> Now I'd like to get some hardware recommendations.  I'm mostly unsure
> about what we'll need in terms of capacity, both for processing power
> and for storing the actual backups.  Less interested in specific model
> or part numbers, because it will need to come from one of our approved
> vendors, of course, and most likely by way of a formal tender process -
> but I can say that we almost always end up buying complete Dell
> rackmount systems.
> 
> The basic parameters I'm working with are:
> 
> - Backing up around 75 servers (mostly Debian, with a handful of other
>   linux distros and a handful of windows machines).
> 
> - Total amount of data to back up is currently in the 40 TB range.
> 
> - Everything is connected by fast (10- or 100-gigabit) networks.
> 
> - Backup will be to disk/vtapes.
> 
> - I've been asked to have backups available for the previous 6 months.
> 
> - I'm assuming that the best way to handle backup of windows clients
>   will be to mount the disk on a linux box and back it up from there,
>   although some of them are virtual machines, so doing a kvm snapshot
>   and backing that up instead would also be an option.
> 
> Given all that, how beefy of a box should I be looking at, and how much
> disk space can I expect to need?
> 
> Also, as a side note, I'm planning on using VDO (Virtual Data Optimizer)
> to provide on-the-fly data compression and deduplication on the backup
> server, which should reduce disk consumption at the cost of CPU
> overhead.  I'm thinking it would make the most sense to use VDO only for
> the filesystem holding the vtapes, and not for the staging area, but
> feel free to correct me on that.

I am a bit surprised by the fact you haven't yet received any reply on
the list so far (maybe per direct/private reply).

Your "project" and the related questions could start a new thread
without problems ;-)

In fact this is a rather *big* amanda installation as far as I know and
there are many things to consider:

* how dynamic is your data: are the incremental changes big or small ...

* what $dumpcycle is targetted?

* parallelity: will your new amanda server have multiple NICs etc / plan
for a big holding disk (array)

* fast network is nice, but this results in a bottleneck called
*storage* -> fast RAID arrays, maybe SSDs.

I am absolutely convinced that Amanda is able to backup your servers.

But IMO this will need a rather big box with fast storage and NICs.

And a fast holding disk (array) to provide parallelity.

-

I'd start with asking: how do your current backups look like?

What is the current rate of new/changed data generated?

(maybe I ignore some of your earlier postings right now, sorry)

-

Other amanda-users here run way bigger installations than me, and should
be able to share some tips here.

I think I would do some basic calculations at first:

* how long does it take to copy all the 40TB into my amanda box (*if* I
did a FULL backup every time)?

* what grade of parallelity is possible?

-> which client server hosts X TB, which bandwidth is available to each
server, which server is able to deliver this and that performance
because of its storage hw/setup ...

etc etc

-

Nevertheless a very interesting project, yes ;-)