DAOS disk savings negated by 1/3 loss in backup throughput performance

[Rob_Katz]

greetings...

i'm running domino 8.5.2, BE 2010 R2, Version 13.0 Rev 4164 (64-bit) and the Domino agent for BE

Now that I have many databases 'daosified', my backup performance for my NSF files has dropped from 1200MB/min to 800MB/min.  Our backups were running at 23+ hours and jumped to 32+hrs.  Now that we've saved over 600GB of disk space, courtesy of DAOS, we are back under 24 hrs.  We anticipated being under/at 17 hours for a backup after saving 600 GB. 

Has anyone seen this type of performance loss?  Is there any way we can get back some/most/all of our lost performance?

It seems more than a little foolish to have saved 600GB in disk space (which was our constraint to adding more users to the server) to now be constrained by the backup (and still unable to add more users to the server). 

Thanks

Rob

[teiva-boy]

Speed primarily has to do with the source speed and how fast it can "read," data, and the target speed, how fast you can write the data.  Of course there are other factors too like CPU, bus speeds, bandwidth, etc...

WIth DAOS, you can compress the Db, files, and even enable single instance storage.  

Does the backup cause Lotus to decompress the Db?  Perhaps this is the cause?  

Does the separation of files from the Db, affect performance?  e.g. having to backup now thousands of small files and not just a large Db?  

I guess we need a better understanding, in what was enabled for DAOS, but also how BackupExec calls the API to backup the data..  (We'll need Symantec support to chime in here)

[Ken_Putnam]

Don't have a clue, but I have set the support flag to draw the attention of the Symantec folks

[Rob_Katz]

the short answer that I got from Symantec is that, unless you disable all of the DAOS features (through the registry) during the backup, this is the performance loss you'll get once you have DAOS installed and you've 'daosified' your databases.  Between the overhead of cross-referencing every ticket with the appropriate NLO file, AND the hundreds of thousands of small NLO files, you get lousy backup performance.

AND, just to add icing to the cake, when i asked about disabling the Lotus Domino Server agent within BE and just backing up my Domino server while it is offline (with the right hardware, that would take about 2 hours), I was told that BE won't let me do a volume backup on a Domino server without renaming a DLL to completely disable the BE Domino Agent.  Essentially, I may need to look for another backup solution if I want to do a Volume restore... 

[pkh]

If you just want to backup the entire volume where the Domino files are, you don't have to disable the Domino agent.  You just de-select everything from under the Domino Databases section and select everything from the volume, e.g. C:\.  However, you have to disable AFE (see the document below).

http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH23369

Otherwise, the .nsf files would automatically be excluded.

Remember to stop your Domino service first before you backup your entire volume, or else, when you restore the .nsf files, they might be unusable.

Note that this method of backing up Domino is not recommended.  The recommended method is still to backup Domino using the agent.

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You might want to look at Symantec System Recovery (SSR) which does image backups and restores.