DiskBackup Licensing - ZFS / Compression Filesystem

AFAIK it looks at how much you protected... so if your mminfo will say that you have on disk device some 15TB you will need more than 10TB in licensing... but perhaps this question should be addressed by someone coming from EMC to have it official.

Hello,

thanks, I just contacted EMC directly.
They told me that licensing is based on the Disksize where the Filebackup is located.
So if your Partition is 10TB, you have to buy a 10TB license. No matter whether there is a compression which could make the partition to store more then 10TB on it.

Cheers

Well I have EMC FAQ for disk option which among other things state:
Q: Is licensing based on maximum storage capacity of the disk storage subsystem or the useable capacity of the disk storage subsystem?

A: It is based on maximum useable storage capacity of the disk storage subsystem.

For me usable storage, from backup point of view, is how much I can squeeze onto that disk even when using compression. Perhaps they changed that to make it more simple in the meantime (and to make it more simple of course as it defeats benefits of compression itself) so that's good news.

Just out of interest - as part of some other work recently I moved all my backup to disk LUN's to ZFS recently. Am getting average 1.7 compression on data that Networker is already compressing - using gzip option at the ZFS level. Mixed backup data of compressed Sybase databases (LGTOnms) & compressed file type data.

Okay that sounds a bit different, as the information I got from the EMC Engineer.
I think i should ask him again, where did you find this FAQ?

The answer from the Engineer was:
"Recommendations: Disk licensing depends on size of Native usable disk size. So if you have 10 TB you need license for 10 TB only. Its does not depend on compressed data. Even you are compressing 20 TB finally it is 10 TB that you will backup."

Remove mark "answered".

This FAQ used to be on PowerLink some time and before that it was on Legato PartnerNet (that does not exist anymore). As I said, what is possible, is that they realized this complicates whole thing (imagine if you used client side compression - you would need to pay for that which does not make sense) so they have change it.

I'm now looking at license guide dated 2008 (I'm not licensing person so usually this stuff is distant to me) which says:
- Five Tier model based on capacity, in TB.
- Tier of License is based on capacity of disk utilized for backup in the entire datazone.

Again, disk utilized here now means how much you used of native capacity. So, if you have 10TB disk and you use staging in such way that you always use at max 5TB then license covering 5TB should be enough. I'm not even sure if EMC is using tiering for disk option license these days. So, I think above line is most likely to be correct - how much native disk capacity you have used of all disks you have within same datazone.

Yes, this sounds very nice.
That's the matter why I ask for the license I need for the DiskBackup.
ZFS is nice to have for an DiskBackup pool.

What kind of Hardware do you use for your ZFS server?
Which transfer rates do you get?

Hi

The storage node is a Sun T2000. The ZFS pools are made up of EMC Clariion LUNs.

Backup speeds vary as most clients are backing up over the network to the ZFS pools. Have found that the the LGTOnms module never dumps fast as I think the Sybase backup server is a limiting factor - most of the backed up data to these pools is Sybase.

However the same storage node has the i500 library with LTO4 drives - hence the cloning is pretty fast 60-90MB/s.

The host has a aggregation of 4 x 1GB NICs

Answer from the EMC engineer:


So yes, you have to buy a license that machtes your native usable harddisk size on which the DiskBackup will be stored.
No matter how many data NetWorker will store on it.