Did anyone notice the rather impressive Backup Exec test report on SP2 that came out in May (the Service Pack came out in May and the Report in June) … to be precise. BE 12.5 SP2 went GA on 18th May via FileConnect. The whole point of SP2 was to improve speed and performance of Backup Exec. It also had a few new fixes and enhancements, but was mainly to provide enhanced performance for 12.5 and earlier versions.
All backup jobs have some performance impact on the system that is being backed up. We have been living with such phrases as “The Shrinking Backup Window” for this very reason – and for years. Inevitably, for the period of time that a system is being backed up, the hard drive is busy reading files in order to carry out the backup. You usually have to run this type of process when it is less likely to impact the system, when the IT bandwidth is not needed for other business processes – over night, or at the weekend for example when other system resources are minimal and the backup job will have the least amount of interference on normal business operations.
If, however, a backup job overruns its allotted backup window you have to decide if it is more important to continue with the backup and lengthen the backup window or abort the backup altogether. By improving backup performance IT is more likely to be able to maintain overall business productivity, and perhaps even reduce their backup windows. Which is a good thing.
Last year we ran a small survey (1,000 respondents) to a bunch of customers who were using legacy versions of BE and discovered that over 50% named “performance” and “speed” as major key influencing factors that would drive them to upgrade. What was interesting was that a large proportion of these BE customers were unaware of all the enhancements we’ve made to BE over the past few years – not just performance.
So Symantec tested SP2 against previous versions of BE and came up with some pretty impressive results:
Compared to prior versions of Backup Exec, Backup Exec 12.5 with SP2 provides:
- 40 percent plus performance improvement in backup transfer rates of a Windows Server® 2003 OS Volume
- 70 percent performance improvement in backup transfer rates of a Windows Server® 2008 OS Volume
- 100 percent performance improvement in incremental backup of Microsoft® Exchange 2003 and 2007
The conclusion is that BE 12.5 with Service Pack 2 (SP2) provides faster backup times compared to previous versions of the product. By upgrading to BE 12.5 with SP2, you can dramatically improve your backup speeds and overall performance, reduce backup windows, and maintain business productivity. Not only that but you will gain a considerable range of enhanced features and functions, such as optimised Microsoft application recovery, granular recovery, virtual machine protection and enhanced system protection.
Hurrah