Samuel, I am using 8 1U linux servers with (4) 250GB disks in a raid 5 (3ware controller) for about 700GB usable space and 1GB of ram to backup the 1500 machines. I limit them to 4 processes running at a time. I am getting about 50% compression (lots of duplicate files) so I am backing up about 9.5TB of data from the workstations. Although the average is about 6 - 7MB per workstation, I have about 40 workstations that have 20 - 30 GB on them. I run from 160 - 220 workstations per server (the server with 220 workstations is too full and I need to move some of them off that server).
I chose this configuration after testing a 4 processor AMD machine (8GB ram) and finding that several smaller machines was much better from the price/performance standpoint. For some reason, when I started getting over 10 backuppc processes running on the AMD box things just started slowing way down (load average >10). I am not sure if it was a network or a disk problem. A Sun system may work, but I would do some calculations to be sure the network can support what you want to do. You should have enough data from the current machines to get a feel for an average length of time for a backup and how much data is in each backup. The only other thing to check is how many simultaneous backups you can run at once before the system load average spikes. I suspect that you will need a much larger array though. In my case I average about 6 - 7 MB of user data per workstation. If you are looking to backup 4000 machines that is 28TB raw or 14TB compressed. As for long backups, I have that problem usually when the workstation is on a slow network (e.g. wireless) and they have large video files. See what is being backed up on the ones that take forever. Also check out their network connection. We found several mis-configured switches when the backups ran slowly in a person's office, but worked fine when the workstation was brought into our helpdesk to figure out why it was so slow. Let us know how it turns out. cheers, ski Samuel Bancal wrote: > Hi All, > > I've read on the backuppc-users list that some admins are backing up > some 1500 clients. > We are trying BackupPC at the university of Geneva (Switzerland) > wondering if it can be applicable for, let's say ~4000 clients. > > At this point, we have 1 server (SunFire 4100, SunOS 5.10, 8GB of > read-write memory, Sun StorEdge 3500 with 12x500GB). > > Now are backed up 163 clients (Win XP, Mac OS X, Linux). > We have a large policy of what is backed up (knowing that the cpool is > doing his work on all the files/programs presents on multiple clients) > The disks are 55% full (2,4TB of 4,5TB). > The server is doing backups during all the day (most of the work each > morning) with a load average around 2,50 3,00. > Some backups take less than 10 minutes and other are taking more than 5 > hours. > > Our questions are : > - How many clients can we hope to backup per server. > - Does it seems familiar to anyone : backups that takes more than 5 hours? > > > Thanks for any reply and testimony! > Samuel Bancal - Uni-Ge -- "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it connected to the entire universe" John Muir Chris "Ski" Kacoroski, [EMAIL PROTECTED], 206-501-9803 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys - and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
