315gb backup to disk taking 15 hours

[Dave_Smith_2]

What can I do to speed up my backup performance? We are backing up 12 servers which all have gigabit nics, cat 6, gigabit switches etc. The backup server is brand new with top notch stats. I can't understand why this backup is taking so long. Since its a backup to hard disk the tape drive can't be a bottleneck.

Are there settings that let change how many servers are backed up at the same time? Please advise how I can troubleshoot this problem.

Thank you,

[Ken_Putnam]

If you copy/xcopy a large chunk of data, does that drag also, or is that OK?

How fragmented is the target disk?  Fragmentation can cause a huge slowdown

Do your NICs support TOE (TCPIP Offload Engine)  if so, see

http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/290098.htm

Message Edited by Ken Putnam on 03-20-2008 09:39 AM

[Dave_Smith_2]

My overall job rate is 368.11 MB/min but now that I am looking at the details I see that some servers have a much worse rate then others. 2 Servers contain the vast majority of our data. 1 thats a NAS with all of our shared data (170gb) and another with a large database(80gb).

The NAS is getting 254 MB/Min and the DB is 1,351MB/Min so there is a definate difference in the throughput of these servers. Whereas the backup server has the capability of doing at least 1,351MB/Min. 11 hours of the 15 hours is being taking up by the NAS backup.

The NAS specs are here

Could it be that the hard drives can't crank out data faster then 254MB/Min?

[Ken_Putnam]

A large number of relatively small files will ALWAYS backup slower than a few large files totally the same number of MB/GB because of the overhead involved in opening/reading/closing each file

Part of the reason the database throughput is so high, is that once you connect, the data just streams

[Dave_Smith_2]

Yeah that's true, it looks like this NAS has 971,607 files that are backed up nightly. Should this be taking 11 hours or can I do something to improve it? Maybe defragment? Perhaps setup some software like diskkeeper to defrag on the weekends or something.

[Ken_Putnam]

not  much you can do to speed up lots of smaller files

a defrag may help a little, but the overhead involved with opening and closing each file is what kills the throughput

[MitchR]

We've got some servers like that, and in some cases the fix was to do a weekly full, daily differential.  The fastest way to backup a file is to not back it up....