DataProtector 6 has a problem, continued

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I posted last week about DataProtector and its Enhanced Incremental Backup. Remember that "enhincrdb" directory I spoke of? Take a look at this:

File sizes in the enhincr directory

See? This is an in-progress count of one of these directories. 1.1 million files, 152MB of space consumed. That comes to an average file-size of 133 bytes. This is significantly under the 4kb block-size for this particular NTFS volume. On another server with a longer serving enhincrdb hive, the average file-size is 831 bytes. So it probably increases as the server gets older.

On the up side, these millions of weensy files won't actually consume more space for quite some time as they expand into the blocks the files are already assigned to. This means that fragmentation on this volume isn't going to be a problem for a while.

On the down side, it's going to park (in this case) 152MB of data on 4.56GB of disk space. It'll get better over time, but in the next 12 months or so it's still going to be horrendous.

This tells me two things:
  • When deciding where to host the enhincrdb hive on a Windows server, format that particular volume with a 1k block size.
  • If HP supported NetWare as an Enhanced Incremental Backup client, the 4kb block size of NSS would cause this hive to grow beyond all reasonable proportions.
Some file-systems have real problems dealing with huge numbers of files in a single directory. Ext3 is one of these, which is why the b-tree hashed indexes were introduced. Reiser does better in this case out of the box. NSS is pretty good about this, as all GroupWise installs before GW became available for non-NetWare platforms created this situation by the sheer design of GW. Unlike NSS, ext3 and reiser have the ability of being formatted with different block-sizes, which makes creating a formatted file-system to host the enhincrdb data easier to correctly engineer.

Since it is highly likely that I'll be using DataProtector for OES2 systems, this is something I need to keep in mind.

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As far as I know there is no real support for OES/Linux in DP6 yet. We were one of the first customers to ask OES/Linux support in Dataprotector a few years back when OES 1 was released. HP hadn't even heard of OES/Linux and we had to educate them in it's existance and workings. They then created a test patch for DP5.5 for us (SSPUX550_132) and after one and a half year of testing and debugging it was finally released as an official DP5.5 patch (PHSS_36291 & PHSS_36293). We haven't seen any official patches released for DP6 yet...

DataProtector 6.2 solves this problem, by the way -- the enhincrdb format has changed so that it doesn't require two files in the client-side database for each file on the client system like it did in 6.11 and before.