Backup Procedure Questions

[gshawns]

Would someone be able to look at our plan for a new backup system and give input as to whether this is a good way to do it or not?  Also, if you have any recommendation on the best way to do this, that would be great!

Here is our hardware:

PE2950 - 2.3GHz Xeon Quad Core processor, 4GB ram, 150GB OS drive (raid 1), 300GB Data drive (raid 1)

PowerVault MD1000 - 9TB Disk array

PowerVault ML6010 - 2 LTO-3 drives tape library

The server is running Windows 2003 Server (standard) x64 and has a c:\ (150gb) d:\ (300gb) and e:\ (9tb)

We are using the server for BEWS 11d (backup to tape), CPS 11d (backup to disk) and as a network storage poing for BESR 6.5 images.

The D:\ drive is for the BEWS catalogs and the CPS journals.

The E:\ drive holds the CPS data and the BESR data

We have about 30 servers to backup and about 4.5TB of data.

Our tape drives will write at over 5GB/min when backing up local data but are only writing 400MB/min when backing up a remote server.  Question 1:  Will we gain any speed by using backup to disk for the remote server?  It seems like we wouldn't because the backups aren't even using the full 5GB/min that is available.  Also, I have read posts about disk fragmentation when using B2D unless you allocate specific amounts of disk space, which can potentially waste space.

Anyway, I have an alternate idea and just want to find out if there are any reasons we wouldn't want to do it this way...

Could we use CPS on all of our servers so they will stream only the changed files to our backup server?  Because "system state" is always changing, we wouldn't have it constantly stream to the backup server but would have a separate CPS job that pushes those changes once a day on a schedule.  Then we would have BEWS write the entire contents of the E:\ drive to tape at higher speeds (because all the data is now local).  My thought is that this would eliminate the "bottleneck" that is causing backup to only write at a fraction of what the tape drives can handle.  Does this sound like a good way to go?  If so, what would we do with our "special" machines like SQL, Oracle, Exhchange, etc. that need special agents in BEWS?  Would we need those agents in CPS?

[thegoolsby]

Hello,

While I think your backup plan is well thought out plan, you might want to spend some time and determine what is causing the bottleneck when backing up the remote servers.  This may cause some other issues down the road.

Have you tried shutting the CPS services down, as a test, to see if your throughput increases any when backing up to tape? How frequently are you running your BESR backups? Have your tried taking them out of the picture?

I would suspect that if you have a BESR backup job, a CPS backup job, and a Backup Exec job all running at the same time that you would see some degradation from not only an OS level, but from a network level as well.

Also, are all of your network drivers up to date on all of your remote servers? If not, make sure they’re up to date with the latest version.

If you have support with us, call in and open a case with us. There are networking tools that we can use to test the network connectivity between your servers, to see if there are any issues.

Let us know if that helps you out any.

[gshawns]

Collin,

Thanks for the quick response.  I have started a case with support.

I know the CPS and BESR services are not the issue because I was getting the same rate before configuring those services.  Also, on the old backup server, we were getting the same slow speeds in our B2D jobs.

Do you know what kind of transfer rates should I expect with the servers all on a gigabit network? 

[thegoolsby]

It definitely sounds like there is something universal with your two servers which causes the degradation.

Now that you have a case with us we’ll help you try to pin point the slow down. Like I said, we have a network tool that we can use that is pretty accurate at identifying network issues.

[gshawns]

Well, I contacted tech support because I never received a call back.  They transferred me to a rep who told me that symantec has no such tools and had me copy/paste a file between servers...?  I eventually had the rep lookup this post so he could see that Symantec employee was telling me this could be done.  He then sent me a link to apparentnetworks.com and told me to follow the instructions.  I was then "accidentally" disconnected from the call.  I never received a call back but emailed the results to the rep when the test finished.  I have not received an email or a call since the disconnect so I'm starting to wonder if the rep just dropped the case...what next?

[Stumpr2]

Can you requeue the case to another rep?

[Keng_Seng_Chee]

I would say dun bother with BackupExec D2D with the setup. Backupexec uses a file to emulate the tape that you are going to store on. This has serious implication on the speed that you will be able to get as the file system on the Host operating system has to handle this creating of files to emulate tape. Windows is not known as the best File IO system around. The best way to deal with this problem is to get to the block level at the storage which in Backupexec case.. isn't going to happen.

I use to run BackupExec 11D with Build 7170 backing up to a SAN array just a month back and i'm horrified at the speed that i am getting. To give u a rough guide, backing up my Windows File servers with 1.3 million files on 2.8 TB takes me 3 full days(Sometimes stretching to 4) starting from Friday night to Monday for a full D2D2T. I have since given several other backup software vendor some testing on their D2D2T implementation and the fastest i've come across is 36 hours for a full D2D2T for my setup on the same hardware and network. This is a huge 36 hours reduction in my backup window.

Currently, i'm gearing towards Microsoft DPM V2 Beta2 which i'm beta testing now. I would say, since u're running mostly Microsoft apps like my setup, this would be the best software to implement for your purpose.

I had enough of Symantec's tech support and running test after test for their Beta grade product. I simply cannot imagine a backup product that requies so many hotfix  in this short release period. Moreover, Symantec techsupport of my region always say it's my SAN and my network that is affecting the thoughput which is simply untrue. Unless you have a serious backward compatibility issue that forces you to stay on Symantec's B2D, my advice is to migrate out of it and it is exactly what i'm doing. I'm keeping the BE11 till the last archive period of my Backupexec tape expires.