QNAP issues as a B2D Device?

[Duke]

Hi all,

 

I have a QNAP TS-859U-RP+ that I'm using as a backup-to-disk device for Backup Exec to put data on. Prior to this I was using a NetApp FAS2020 but needed more capacity. Both are using SATA drives in RAID5.

 

I'm getting a lot of errors from the QNAP box (or from Backup Exec regarding the QNAP) about being able to write data, or it suddenly becoming unavailable:

 

• An error occurred while processing a B2D command. Drive: Write() WriteFile failed 0/64 @13522615 (\\qnapbox\be\core\B2D006990.bkf). Error=64
  
• Storage device "QNAP CORE DATA" reported an error on a request to write data to media. Error reported: The specified network name is no longer available.
  
• An error occurred while processing a B2D command. Drive: ReadFMTable() SFMB Not Found (\\qnapbox\be\core\B2D007038.bkf). Error=13
  
• An error occurred while processing a B2D command. Changer: CreatePath() CreateDirectory1 failed (\\qnapbox\be\core\). Error=53
  
• Storage device "QNAP CORE DATA" reported an error on a request to write data to media. Error reported: The semaphore timeout period has expired.
  

 

Anyone seen anything like this before or have any idea how to fix it? I had the 'concurrent operations' on the B2D folder set up as 4 because it's got 4 cores, but I've now dropped it down to 2. There's another server's backup jobs sometimes going to this box too, but I'd expect a NAS to be able to handle TWO clients at once...

 

Chris

[richbrowncardiff]

on the server running the B2D jobs (master media server) have you got an additinoal lan port ? in Backup exec 2010 r3 (probably in other versions too) you can select the lan port to use to shoot the data over the network. I would be inclined to setup a vlan and send the traffic over it to the nas and see if this helps as it maybe network related rather than the actual device.

 

not saying this would cure it but not had any issues like this myself. Hope this helps

[DMcCoy]

but I'd expect a NAS to be able to handle TWO clients at once...

 

Experience has taught me otherwise. Anything with an atom or even something more powerful with SATA drives simply can't keep up. I expect if you look at the windows logs you may find a delayed write failed when the error in BE occured.

 

I prefer near line SAS DAS on the backup server and from there to a decent encrypted LTO4/5. NAS have been disapointing me for years.

[Duke]

Cheers guys! Yes, I do have a spare NIC on the BE server and do need to get around to VLANning at some point, it's just been a bit tricky as we've only just moved to this device and it's in a different location so I'll need to figure out my new VLANs. QNAP support have come back and said it's a DNS issue and want me to check my DNS servers. I'm a bit sceptical though as everything's on static IPs and has manual DNS entries. The BE server does have multiple IPs with the same hostname, maybe that's causing issues...?

[richbrowncardiff]

It could be the multiple ip issue but to test this you can narrow it down by just having 1 lan port active at a time. The other thing i'd try is teaming the nics of NAS and trunking them through the switch to give you a 2gbps connection. you can also run come basic tracert and ping -t commands to see what the hops are like etc.

 

If you need any detailed info feel free to pm me.

 

Cheers

[Duke]

Cheers, much appreciated! Just had a remote session with David from QNAP and he can't see anything obviously wrong, but to rule out permissions and SMB issues he's asked me to switch over to iSCSI. It's not an ideal solution, but iSCSI is technically the better protocol for this kind of thing so I'm going to give it a try and see how the backups run.