Unix Backup and Recovery

Reduction in Network Traffic

One of the best ways to perform backups is to install a completely separate network to carry all the backup traffic. However, many people do not have the funding necessary to set up such a network, so they need to be careful about how their backup system influences the network that it shares. There are a few different things that backup products can do to minimize their impact on the network, whether it is a private one for backups or the corporate backbone.

Keep Backup Traffic at the Subnet Level

One of the best ways for a backup product to reduce the amount of traffic that goes between networks is to distribute the backup devices to the subnet level. Keeping backup traffic on its local subnet results in two benefits. First, backup traffic is distributed, so that no single subnet sees all the traffic. The overall impact to the internal customer (who also is trying to use the corporate intranet) is therefore reduced. The second benefit is that the overall throughput of the backup system will be able to scale with the network as the network grows by the addition of subnets. Consider the drawing in Figure 5-7. There are six different subnets (100.10-100.15), each of which is switched 10 MB (switches not shown). Each of the switches is plugged into a router, which also is plugged into the 100.1 subnet, where the backup server resides.

Figure 5-7. Network ...