Backup exec 2010 R3 on 10Gig LAN

[beaumont1]

Hi all,

currently we have our BE2010R3 environment running on 1GB LAN. We are looking for reduce backup windows and improve backup rate. We have 3 media server writing on a DD640. Management is asking for evaluating an network infrastructure upgrade to 10Gb on all clients/media server/data domain.

My question is, is Backup Exec able to handle a 10Gb backup stream? Will we get a real improvement? My guess is that maybe a new media server and a new backup device is the better solution. What is the reccomended number of media server and parallel running backup jobs for a BE server?

Many thanks

[CraigV · Accepted solution]

Hi,

BE can handle a SAN-based backup so there is no reason for it to not handle a 10GB network. It would simply send data as fast as the media server could receive it.

No real recommendation, but on 1 of my sites I had 1 media server (HP ProLiant DL385 G5 with 8GB RAM) backing up 28 servers in 3 jobs at the same time to an HP StorageWorks MSL6060 (no SAN backups, all across a 1GB LAN) and had no issues.

Thanks!

[mboyle]

In our environtment, teaming 4 NICs to achieve a bandwidth of 4Gb/s did not help in reducing backup windows or increase the job rate.  It actually made it worse.  Take in to consideration the storage device's disk setup: RAID, SATA/SAS throughput.  I am not familiar with the DD640 so I cannot comment on it, but for others reading this post, take all facets of the backup process in to consideration. 

Our bottleneck is the RAID 5 3Gbs SATA drives that has/had upwards of 8 jobs writing and verifying against one volume group at a time.