Processer and compression performance

[Dave_h]

Hi folks,

I have a P3 700 with 1 GB or RAM running windows 2000 server, veritas 9 runs on this server.

Backing up 130GB to disk over my network takes about 16 hours inc verify. About 110GB of these files are on the veritas server. Software compression is enabled.

I'm upgrading this server (about time I hear you call) to either a dual XEON @ 3GHz or a clustered P4@3GHz. Will these specs make the backup quicker (compressions probably the biggest culprit)? Will the XEON be really quick compared to the P4 or not make that much of a difference? I've not made my mind up which one I'll buy.

thanks for your help
Dave

[Ken_Putnam]

I would not expect the newer processors to make that much difference. At one time I ran v7.3 on a P2/233 desktop machine and drove two DLT7000s at device capacity.

IMHO, RAM is more important, tho these days almost every machine has sufficient RAM. My Rule of Thumb is 128MB per active backup over and above any other requirements, so a server with 1 GB could probably drive 3-4 drives at device limits

[Dave_h]

Surely the processer speed must improve the compression speed. I'm getting around 200MB/min for the backup, surely it can run faster than that. The drives the data is on are IDE's ATA 133's. These drives can handle 133MB/sec. Obviously the LAN is limited to 100Mb per second which equates to about 9MB/sec or 540MB/min , so the bottle neck should be the LAN. This doesn't explain why I only get 200MB/min.
Surely the compression of files takes processer time, for instance I know the faster processer I have, the faster I can archive files using winrar or winzip, thats a fact. So surely it's the same for veritas?

Dave

[Dave_h]

Hi Ken,
remember your devices control the hardware compression, when you backup to disk the compression is software, not hardware.

cheers
Dave

[Ken_Putnam]

I haven't used HW compression in so long that I can't remember. (after getting burned trying to restore on a DLT7000 data that was backed up on a DLT4000. Luckily the 4000 was still available.)

Even using SW compression, I wouldn't expect much difference,

Back in the 386/486 days it was definitely something to consider, but by P5/P6 days, there were enough CPU cycles availalbe that I never saw any difference when I benchmarked HW vs SW

Unless your CPU is at 90-100% utilization during backups with the old system, you probably won't see much improvement on the new relative to compression/no compression

[Deepali_Badave]

Hello,

As there is a problem of slow backup, try taking a backup uisng NTbackup to isolate the cause of the issue.


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