Sun Microsystems SUN FIRE X4500 - Manual (Page 6)

5 Configuration Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Solaris Configuration
The X4500 server used while testing for this paper was installed with Solaris 10 8/07. This is the recommended version
to use with Netbackup as various ZFS improvements were introduced in this build.
The X4500 has 48 500GB SATA drives. The two boot drives (c5t0d0 and c5t4d0) are mirrored using Solaris Volume
Manager. The rest of the drives are available for backup data.
Zpool Configuration
Zpool configuration is a decision that needs to be made based on a number of factors.
• What is the required performance needed? (IOPS/Throughput)
• What is the required data protection level needed? (RAIDZ/RAIDZ2/Mirror)
• What is the required capacity?
After gathering and analyzing the requirements, a configuration that balances the needs of those requirements can be
chosen.
When configuring the system for network backups, the ability of the X4500 to receive data over the network is also a
factor. For example, a 450MB/s backup speed requirement cannot be met solely by using the 4 onboard Gigabit
Network ports. Additional network cards would be needed to meet this requirement.
Care should be taken that a system is not over configured for disk performance, at the expense of space or data
protection, when the entire system (encompassing backup clients and network infrastructure) is not able to send data
at adequate levels. Likewise, a system should not be over configured for space at the expense of performance or data
protection.
For the purposes of this Quick Start Guide, the X4500 was configured one zpool consisting of 8 x 5 disk RAIDZ vdevs.
Additionally, 6 hotspares were configured for reliability. This gives the X4500 sufficient disk performance to handle 300-
350MB/sec of backup traffic over the network.
Example Zpool creation script:
#!/bin/bash
zpool create -f nbupool raidz c0t0d0 c1t0d0 c4t0d0 c6t0d0 c7t0d0 \
raidz c0t1d0 c1t1d0 c4t1d0 c5t1d0 c7t1d0 \
raidz c0t2d0 c1t2d0 c5t2d0 c6t2d0 c7t2d0 \
raidz c0t3d0 c1t3d0 c4t3d0 c6t3d0 c7t3d0 \
raidz c0t4d0 c1t4d0 c4t4d0 c6t4d0 c7t4d0 \
raidz c0t5d0 c4t5d0 c5t5d0 c6t5d0 c7t5d0 \
raidz c0t6d0 c1t6d0 c4t6d0 c5t6d0 c6t6d0 \
raidz c1t7d0 c4t7d0 c5t7d0 c6t7d0 c7t7d0 \
spare c6t1d0 c5t3d0 c4t2d0 c1t5d0 c7t6d0 c0t7d0