travis' brain dump

So I shunned technology for a few days… I needed it.  Tech-Post warning – skip it if your brain hurts from reading these.

Well, we’re definitely into the week of pushing out the hardware/software combinations to our remaining sites and the first full week or two results are amazing in Denver and Tulsa. We cannot wait to roll out the rest of our CommVault installations.

It was incredible to come in this morning though and see that the Exagrid was working great. Unit 1 which has been holding all of our SQL and server backups is rocking and rollin. With a de-dupe ratio of 5.81:1 it’s holding ~4.4TB of backup data in 760GB of space. That’s two weeks of data crammed in there… CRAZY! As for our  Unit 2 that backs up our NAS which has the highest rate of changed files I think, it’s holding at a de-dupe ratio of 3.17:1 holding ~8.03TB of backup data in ~2.5TB of space. While that’s only a week of data there, that’s two fulls and several incrementals. It may actually get better since at the moment it’s in the process of doing some deduplication. Scary! I’m just amazed at what this technology is doing. It’s even better in practice than it looks on paper. LOL

Another lesson learned from this last couple of weeks in addition to not using single instancing with Exagrid… DO NOT USE SYNTHETIC FULLS. 🙂 It’s quite honestly best to do a weekly full and daily incrementals if you have too much data to do daily fulls.

With our backup jobs being a bit more stable now that I’ve got a good grip on using CommVault Galaxy, we’re seeing some much needed improvement on the backup speeds. We’re able to secure much more data in a much more shorter window than before which is absolutely amazing. I’m not making exact calculations yet but I’d say we’ve reduced it below 30 hours.  Less tapes, less hard drive space… I’m loving it.