Backup LAN/Network

Backup LAN/Network

Ha, found an old picture of a backup server I deployed a few years back. This is when virtualisation was still new and traditional enterprise backup was still king. In all honesty I still cant get over the fact that you can have so many physical network adaptors working in a single machine.

What you have are the 4 onboard NICs and then 3 * 4 Port Intel Network cards, you also had several Fibre channel cards to connect to the NetApp Storage array and Tape Library (not listed under network adaptors).

The primary interfaces for the server were two physical ports, where you had bonding so you only had a single logical port. This provides redundancy and greater throughput.

Then the other ports were on VLANS that formed a backup network, each VLAN went to it's own floor in the data centre. I think we even had dedicated switches for the backup LAN on most floors where there were lots of servers needing backing up.

Each server being backed up, had a dedicated network port just for backup.

A backup network was useful for several reasons, one to reduce network traffic on the primary network, two a level of network separation.