White Papers

34
Setting Up the Dell DR Series System as an RDA or VTL Backup Target for Dell NetVault Backup
A.1.3 VTL Default Account Summary Table:
Service
Account
Default Credentials
CLI Modifier
NDMP
ndmp_user
St0r@ge!
ndmp --setpassword
iSCSI
<Appliance Hostname>
St0r@ge!iscsi
iscsi--setpassword
A.2 Managing VTL media and space use
A.2.1 General performance guidelines for DMA configuration
• The DR Series system (version 3.2 and later) provides inline VTL deduplication, compression, and
encryption at rest functionality. Backup applications (such as Dell NetVault, Symantec BackupExec,
Symantec NetBackup, and so on) should be configured so that any multiplexing, pre-compression,
software-side deduplication, or encryption is disabled. Enabling any of these features may adversely
affect the space savings and ingest performance of the DR Series system VTL feature.
• Slots and media should be configured so as to accommodate the environment backup requirements.
Initially, the logical capacity of a VTL should be no more than twice the physical size of the DR Series
system. If the initial VTL setup is over-subscribed at higher than a 2-1 ratio without proper planning
the DR Series system could fill up prematurely and cause unexpected system outage. It is highly
advisable to configure the DR Series system VTL feature such that the media count be made to
accommodate your initial data protection requirements. and then media be added as the
deduplication statistics become available to ascertain growth, media, and space requirements.
• Media Type selection will depend on a number of factors including the DMA used, the backup cycles,
data sources, and more. As a general rule, using smaller tapes is better than using larger tapes so as
to allow for a higher level of control over space usage by backup operations. This also allows for
easier handling in the event of a system running out of physical space as well as the normal data
cleanup procedures.
• Adding media to an existing DR Series system VTL is painless and should be leveraged to
incrementally add media as needed. Although this may require a higher level of involvement in
managing the media usage, it will result in better performance and avoid unplanned outages.
A.2.2 Physical DR space sizing and planning
Various factors such as total data footprint, change rate, backup frequency and data lifecycle policies will
dictate how much physical space will be needed to accommodate the Virtual Tape Libraries within a DR
Series environment. In addition, if other container types are hosted these two must be factored into space
requirement calculations. As a general rule the following can be used as a reference architecture to determine
the basic capacity needed for a given virtual tape library container: