Back up to a San is very slow

[snowsnake]

Good morning.  About 3 weeks ago I began noticing that my daily incremental back ups were running slower than usal.  They would average 560 mb a minute now they are running at 70mb a minute.  This is also happening with my full tape backups on the weekends.  They all use to run around 560mb a minute and no anywhere from 33 to 60 mb a minute.  I am not sure what else to check.  The servers are both Dell's, a 2850 and a 2950 and I am running a Dell 3000i san.  I am using Symantec 12.5 back up.  Like I have stated before, I am not sure why this has slowed down.  Any help would be appricated.

Thanks

[CraigV]

Have you looked into SAN SSO with Backup Exec?
It will allow the full speed of the SAN to be used, and will cut down on backup times too. You would need a full installation of BE on each server that you'd want to backup across the SAN (so ideally your file and print server, Exchange etc...anything with a large backup size).
Using the method you're using, I suspect it's running your backups across your LAN, which means you need to look there...it would have nothing to do with your SAN in this case. Here is a link to follow:

http://support.veritas.com/docs/258734 <-- BE Admin's Guide

[teiva-boy]

 I dont believe SSO would help here.  There is something amiss to begin with, and throwing money at the problem is not a solution...  And heck you can't trial SSO in production anyways (which sucks)

Defrag, use MPIO if the MD3000i supports it, perhaps even use the NTFS change journal rather than normal incremental settings.  

[CraigV]

Double-check on the defrag. I know HP don't recommend defragging RAID arrays due to the way in which they're configured by the RAID controller.
Just verify that with Dell. You might cause an even bigger problem down the line.

[Symboy]

 Hi 

  Please verify that it's not a network issue . If the backups are going to the disk , You can verify  that by just copy-paste of some data outside backup exec . 

  Also make sure that you have not made any changes in the job like encryption , compression etc.