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Poor Man's San
slinuxuzer
Member Posts: 665 ■■■■□□□□□□
in Off-Topic
A few months ago I took a class on backup exec and the instructor mentioned this, and I had never thought of it, so I figure many others haven't either so I'll share.
The idea is basically to get a cheap unmanged gigabit switch and run all of your servers second nics (I have poweredge 2950's so they and most dell servers have atleast two nics) to this switch and then if your backup app lets you pick wich subnet to run your jobs over (backup exec 11d does), setup all your nics on a new address range and voila! you have a poor man's san.
This worked very well at my plant, I have our mail server connected to our tape library via scsi cable and then all our servers are connected to this new switch, it made 2 hour jobs run at around an hour. This took strain off our production network even if they were off hours and shortened the time window that all jobs run in substantially.
So I hope this little write up helps someone, and if it does please reply and let me know if your going to implement this.
The idea is basically to get a cheap unmanged gigabit switch and run all of your servers second nics (I have poweredge 2950's so they and most dell servers have atleast two nics) to this switch and then if your backup app lets you pick wich subnet to run your jobs over (backup exec 11d does), setup all your nics on a new address range and voila! you have a poor man's san.
This worked very well at my plant, I have our mail server connected to our tape library via scsi cable and then all our servers are connected to this new switch, it made 2 hour jobs run at around an hour. This took strain off our production network even if they were off hours and shortened the time window that all jobs run in substantially.
So I hope this little write up helps someone, and if it does please reply and let me know if your going to implement this.