Recommendations for placement of Protection Engine for NAS in dedicated subnets with regard to the Netapp environment.

Products

• Protection Engine for NAS

Issue/Introduction

What is the recommended setup, with regards to networking, to get Protection Engine for Network Attached Storage to contact the NetApp Filer on a specific network interface.

Cause

Concern for optimal network performance between the clients and NetApp Filer, and the Protection Engine scanners with the NetApp Filer(s). 

Resolution

For NetApp Filer environments that will see heavy network traffic it is recommended that a dedicated network is used for scanning.  This should help reduce saturation on the public network to the NetApp Filer, since scanning traffic will be routed through the private scanning network.

Note, for this setup the Protection Engine server(s) will need two NICs. Additionally this second NIC for the private scanning network will have to be configured as the primary NIC on the Protection Engine Server.  This is because in RPC mode, SPE cannot bind to other IPs/NICs on the machine it is running on, and by default only listens on the servers primary NIC.

To set the NIC binding order,

1. Open the Network Connections Windows for the Scan Engine server.
2. At the top, click on the "Advanced" tab.
3. In the drop down, click on "Advanced Settings..."
4. In the "Connections" field, under the "Adapters and Bindings" tab, use the arrows to adjust the NIC binding order so the private network or VLAN is at the top.