Dedicated Backup Network
You may find that even by upgrading your network bandwidth to 100 Mbps or even 1 GbE your primary network is so busy during the evening hours when backup runs that it would still hinder performance. That’s when you want to consider implementing a dedicated backup network. These are great if you can afford to put one in. All of the backup data travels across this dedicated backup network and nothing travels across your public network.
Many customer sites that we have visited have dedicated backup networks, and the performance benefits are tremendous. A dedicated backup network requires an additional interface in the servers to be hosted on this new network. This also may require some configuration modifications to your backup software in order to ensure you are using the dedicated network versus the public network. One of our customers has two dedicated networks.
Normally, this would be a good time to recommend that you deploy another device host, or media server. However, while on site, we discovered that they had plenty of horsepower in the master server to drive the tapes and receive the data, so it wasn’t necessary to install another server in the domain. Instead we opted for another NIC to allow this server to method and saved the client’s budget for other things in the enterprise.
Sometimes called a TAN, for tape area network (if that’s all being hosted on the switches), a SAN usually consists of some kind of fiber or fabric switch, host bus adapters (HBAs) in the servers, and a zoning configuration on the switches to ensure proper routing of devices and information. A SAN is very similar to what you are used to with traditional networking. A LAN, for instance, consists of a switch or even a hub that has servers and other computing devices attached to it for the purposes of sharing resources. Similarly the main purpose of a SAN is to share resources, but instead of a 100-Mbps switch, it is a fiber switch. Not only can servers attach to it but also storage devices, such as disk and tape. A SAN is not as complex as you might think.
Really, if you think about it, networking is just plumbing. You have a variety of pipes that connect together in order to deliver something. In a home, it’s water; in a data center, it’s data. So we have this elaborate piece of plumbing that allows the sharing of resources in a very efficient and surprisingly fast manner.