Job Rate on same Job between 600 MB/min and 55 MB/min at different days

[Dieter_Tontsch]

Hello, on the same job, my weekly backup, but others too, the average job rate differes between more then 6�00 MB/s and 55 MB/min. The same job can have an average tranfer speed of 600 MB/min 10 days ago and just 55 Mb/min today. Most of the jobs go pretty fast, but about 20 % are realy slow. As I said, I am talking about hte same job without doing any changes. I figured out that usually jobs started manually can be that slow, the scheduled ones (still the same one) seem to go faster.
I am running 11d and the job backups contian:
- file backup
- system state backup
- Exchange Stores backup
- Exchange Mailbox Backup, legacy method
It backs up about 10 servers all but one onver a 100 Mbit/s netowrk on LAN, no firewall inbetween. The backu is made on Tapes, AIT3 on a SONY Storage Device StoreDat.

As I said, I am talking about the same backups, the fast and the slow one.
Thanks,
Dieter

[Eric_Sabo_2]

I am having the same type of issue. Fast one day and slow the next. 11 has been a lot slower than 10 was. I don't know why this is. I have a call open with Symantec support but still nothing has been resolved yet.

[Kevin_Nickson]

What OS are you running? I have found that as soon as I install SP1 for Windows 2003 Server, my backups instantly go from about 700Mb/min to less than 200Mb/min. I have one server that I backup about 800Gb per night on and over the past weekend, I had two jobs that both took over 30 hours to complete. I can normally get both jobs done in less than 12 hours.

SP1 for Win2K3 has ruined my life. I installed it due to a virus that exploits Windows. SP1 fixed the exploit but now I can't run backups anymore. Not sure which is worse at this point.

I'm going to start testing "synthetic" backups as soon as possible but in my opinion, that will only mask the underlying problem. Symantec won't acknowledge any problems with SP1 but in my real life expereince, there is a major problem. I went through this about a year ago with 10d. Once I rebuilt the backup server and left SP1 off, the backups were flawless. Put it back on and the backups are crap again.

Symantec says it's a Microsoft problem and Microsoft says it's a Symantec problem. It's no win situation and I as a the consumer am paying the price for the fact that there is an incompatibility between Backup Exec and Windows 2003 Server SP1.

[Dieter_Tontsch]

I am running w2k3 SP1 as you assumed, but this is no eplicaton that one day it is 10 times faster then another one and vice-versa.

[Jack_Dorsey]

I doubt that it has much to do with Win Server 2K3 SP1, personally. We have been running SP1 since its inception and never saw any changes. Besides, if this were an SP1-related issue, you'd see more griping over it besides a handful (if that many) of users.

Dieter, are you running encryption with the new version upgrade? If so, we have realized around -130MB/min throughput on all of our jobs once encryption is enabled. This would be by design since encryption is somewhat taxing to the processor(s). However, this hardly substantiates the big differences you are seeing every 10 days or so.

Could it be possible that another type of job or application is running at the times that you are seeing the slower throughput rates? You might check Scheduled Tasks on the Windows server, anti-virus (look to see if a scan is happening at the same time a backup job is running), etc.

[Dieter_Tontsch]

No, I am not running encryption. I will monitor whether the ANtiVirus software eventually interfeers, still I am wondering why now it is fast and tomorrow it is slow.

[Dennis_Thornton]

My BE server is also a file server. Local backups were running at about 800MB/min (2003 x64, 3Ghz dual core Xeon, 4GB RAM, Overland LTO2 Arcserve). Yesterday I uninstalled the antivirus (another issue) and the backup rate jumped to 1400MB/min.

As one would expect, the antivirus slows things down, but a 600MB to 55MB drop seems excessive.

[Dieter_Tontsch]

You are right, my BE server is a file serer too, but I am talking about the average rate of all the backup stuff, local and remote. I could check how I can add the BE into the virus exception list or so, but still, why this difference as you asked yourself.
Since I am just evaluating BE 11, I have used 8.x on an older machine, I sticked now to CA BrightStor (ARCserve) and will do some tests with that. Since it looks failry good and perfomrant to me and the Veritas support is rather lazy, actually for Evaluation Users they do nto provide any support at all, at least this is what I ws told at the phone, I guess i will go for CA.
This will be decided in a few weeks.

Dieter

PS:
I have to say that my impression is that since Veritas was taken over by Symantec, the quality decreased a lot, going straight down to the quality of norton and others. Norton and it's modules is not usable for me in a business environment, it might be an option for end users who have no idea what they do ....