We recently upgraded to Backup Exec for Windows Servers version 12 which comes with the ability to use the Advanced Open File Option for backups. After switching to using the Advanced Open File Option our backup times increased between 30-50%. Although I would expect there to be some increase in backup times because of the snapshotting process, I would not have expected this much difference. Technicial support has tried a few things, but in the end we have been told that our experience is normal and that technical support does not deal with performance issues. My concern with this response is that no one has been able to tell me what specific action is occuring to increase our backup times so dramatically. As a last result, I would like to seek some help from the user community on this one. I would appreciate it if anyone out there could run some simple tests on their systems to see if they experience the same kind of dramatic increase in backup times with the AOFO option. Some guidelines for the testing:
During our testing we were using the following:
Backup Exec 12D
Windows 2003 Server Standard
The backup selections were from the local backup server to keep any network issues from the equation. The files backed up were standard files from the OS partition and did not include any SQL, Exchange or other special files. Backup test sets ranged from 25GB to 100GB in order to give a good indication of performance. One backup would be run with AOFO off, and another backup run for the same selections with AOFO on.
If anyone out there is able to duplicate some testing with similar parameters I would love to hear the results.
Thanks,
Troy
