Backup Exec 2012, EMC VNXe CIFS shares, performance issues

[jtomi]

Hi

I have enviroment where we try to backup ~1.5Tb data from VNXe CIFS shares with Backup Exec 2012 SP3 to DataDomain 620 (BOOST/OST enabled). Problem is that full backup takes ~40hrs complete and incremental backup also takes ~40hrs. I tested with NDMP trial license and full backup takes 18hrs and incremental backup takes 1-2hrs. So there is quite large time difference. 

So I suggested customer that they buy NDMP license but customer disagreed to pay more and demands more accurate explanation why they would need to buy NDMP license. So is there any deep level detailed information how backup is done when backing trough CIFS and when backing trough NDMP? Or solution to make CIFS backups go much faster. I understand that when backing trough CIFS, it needs to be read trough BE agent on media server, but why incremental backup is taking so long?

[Colin_Weaver]

CIFS is not a protocol that is optimized for backups as such it can be slower than agent or option based backups. The NDMP Option (using the NDMP Protocol) is designed to get around the performance limitations of CIFS (oh and for info our remote agent communication also uses a subset ofthe NDMP Protocol commandset.)

Also we do not support Incremental backup over shares as functionality that relies on the presence of a remote agent on the source device is not available.

[jtomi]

Backup method "by modified time" requires agent onboard right?

But how about "Using archive bit"? I realized that I didn't test it and it seems to perform incremental backup faster. 

[Colin_Weaver]

Does not matter which method both need the remote agent in order to enure that you don't end up just backing up the full data instead of doing an incremental.

A paragraph in  the following article mentions this

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH68920

[jtomi]

Thank you Colin, that article explained it pretty well. 

[jschaum1]

You can use the mklink command to map the CIFS share to a folder on a Windows server disk.  You can then select that folder from the drive in Backup Exec and it will backup the CIFS share.  It will recognize the archive bit and do incremental backups properly.  I have a VNXe 3100 and am doing it myself.  It works great.  You can go to the following link to get info on the mklink command:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc753194.aspx