BEX 2010 very long time to load tape media

[Squeed]

Hi there, im hoping one of you can help me with an issue we are experiencing with our backup system.  We've recently upgraded from BEX 12 to BEX 2010 which all seemed to go very well (apart from a few agent issues that patches resolved).  A couple of weeks back we introduced a D-D-T stratagy and whilst the D-D part works well we've noticed that the duplicate to tape can take over an hour to load the tape media (even though the tape is in the LTO drive.  Once BEX decides that it has the media the duplications run through as per normal.

A bit of background on our setup;

BEX 2010 (fully patched as of 21/7/2010) running on a Windows 2008 32bit (also fully patched)
The tape drive is a Quantum LTO 4 library with 8 slots
The B2D location is an EMC iSCSI attached SAN
Each of the servers (around 20 of them) are setup as individual selection lists and we stream four backups at a time to the B2D

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

[pkh]

1) Did you install the Symantec drivers for this library?  If not go to Tools -->  Wizards --> Device Configuration Wizard to do so.

2) Power cycle your library followed by your server

3) Try backing up a small directory directly to tape.

4) Try a D-D-T job with the B2D folder on a normal disk drive, not on the SAN.

[Squeed]

Thanks for your ideas, as always not all of the information was provided with the issue i just logged :)

1) Did you install the Symantec drivers for this library?  If not go to Tools -->  Wizards --> Device Configuration Wizard to do so.
Yes the library is using the Symantec drivers

2) Power cycle your library followed by your server
The backup system is currently running, so i will give this a try in the morning, but i know the server its self has been power cycled (just not the library as well)

3) Try backing up a small directory directly to tape.
We run a differential during week days and some of those backups are only 1-2 gig in size and have the same issue as 2-3TB backups, although during a nightly backup some of the duplications will kick off very quickly (say a couple of mins), the duplications that kick off at a normal time seem to be random each time, and as yet i haven't been able to find a pattern if there is indeed one.

4) Try a D-D-T job with the B2D folder on a normal disk drive, not on the SAN.
I'll give this a try, although to be honest i hope its not the problem as we backup 3-4TB's each weekend and so need the space of the SAN to run a D-D-T.

Again, thanks for your help with this.

[pkh]

For suggestion 3 & 4, I am trying to eliminate the SAN as a source of the problem.  A small backup to tape will test whether there is a problem with the library.

[Squeed]

Ahhh, right got you.  If we run a backup directly to tape the issue does not appear, it only seems to happen if it is a duplication of a backup job.  but tomorrow i'll run a D-D-T from the local disk to take the SAN out of the equation.

[RahulG]

If you are running the duplicated backup from disk to tape , in that case only when the Original job finished backup exec will load the tape for the duplicate job ...make sure the original job is completed . before the duplicate job is started.

[Squeed · Accepted solution]

It looks like we've tracked down the issue, our EMC SAN's iSCSI connection software seems to conflict with access to the LTO library.  This all came to a head last night when we experienced a different issue completely.... Backup Exec could not access the Media server at all even though it was running fine.  By uninstalling the  EMC software everything went back to working again.

Thanks for your idea's everyone, if i get a fix from EMC i will post it in here for future people who experience this issue.