I'm looking for some advice. I have a storage and unix background, with some TSM experience. Our backup admin recenlty jumped ship and the rest of my team is struggling to maintain and upgrade our Netbackup environment.
The setup... We currently have two sites, three media servers at each site, and one master server at our primary site. The master server has been upgraded to the 64-bit, 7.6 version on Windows 2008, but the media servers are still running on Windows 2003, with the 32-bit, 7.5 version. Each site has a ~9 year old Virtual Tape Library (which I inherited and is poorly configured) and a physical tape library with 6 tape drives. We do full backups on the weekend and incrementals during the week. A week of backups is about 35-40TB and we're not currently doing dedupe, though I believe we are licensed for it (and a bunch of other features). Some backups are streamed directly to tape, some go to some small disk pools, and some go to the VTL. In both latter scenarios, there are jobs to dupe those backups to tape and are immediately expired from the intermediate storage.
We recently bought a couple of shelves of 2TB SATA drives for each site. My inital thought is to make 2x 12+2 R6 RAID Groups out of them, each accounting for about 22TB. I know it'll be slow, but it should be an improvement on the (dying) VTL experience. I've been reading a little about Netbackup but am out of my element. I know we need to upgrade our media servers to Windows 2008 and Netbackup 7.6. But, I'm also looking for suggestions about how to make this setup better. Right now, the backups are immediatly expired from VTL as they are duped off to tape, so any restore requires us to recall tape. In my ideal setup, I'd like to backup directly to this new disk and then dupe the images off to tape daily, in some sane/staged fashion. I'd like to leave the images on disk and let Netbackup automatically expire them as it needs space (maybe possible with Storage Lifecycle Management), enabling me to restore from disk for up to a week or two.
Does anyone have any experience with doing this? Should I consider dedupe? How much more infrastructure would I need to build out on top of the upgraded media servers to support this config?
Thanks!