Survey - How fast is your catalog backup to tape...

Friday I was doing a health check on a system I setup 18 months ago.
That system was a single Sun T2000 with CLARiiON disk R1/0 (10 x 146GB 15K).
The volume was a simple Solaris sliced disk (400GB) using UFS. The catalog is 122GB. Images are not being compressed on disk (global NBU tunable value)
Why do I mention this?
Catalog disk performance has a huge impact on overall backup performance as well as (obviously) catalog backup. The database portion of the backup goes quickly and it pegs the performance of the LTO3 tape drives (85-90MB/s as read via iostat –xtcn 3) The catalog portion sustains 40-45MB/s with occasional peaks in the mid 50’s – again, verified via iostat Previously, the catalog disk was on a single mirrored pair ( 2x146GB 15K) in the CLARiiON (CX700). Performance was good, but not as high. If you are experiencing low performance (and it sounds like you are), you should consider migrating the catalog to a higher performance disk. Hope that helps

Thanks for the numbers DG267.

I'd like to move to faster disk, but our catalog is c. 400 GB compressed to c.250 GB, and it's stuck on a NetApp 3070 active-active cluster being synchronously replicated over to another site by SnapMirror, and thus the LUN has to sit in a "trad vol", and thus we can can't waste spindles - so it's sitting in a 4D+2P parity group of 300GB 15k FC-AL disks.  Ideally it would sit in a much bigger parity group, but...  I keep thinking we should move the NetBackup master to our HP XP12000 arrays.

(a little late as I was on PTO)

2 masters

Prod master
database 90 mb's
images 36 mb's

DR master
database 55 mb's
images 37 mb's

Both hover around:

67 MB/s db
22 MB/s images