Hello,
2 weeks ago my monthly backups to tape started to fail after months (I've been with this company for 8 months) of having no problems. Due to not having new unused media available I had been going back to the oldest available tapes and reusing them and had been having no problems until 2 (now almost 3) weeks ago. Based on the various error messages in the logs of the failing jobs I practically re-wired the server room, I changed ports the server plugged into, changed the CAT5 cable, changed the fiber cable between the server and the tape drive and switched NICs on the server but still got the same results, jobs failing. I then suspected that the tapes were bad so we procurred new media but when I used them the next weeked instead of getting failing jobs (I did get 3 failures but not as many as the week before) I started to see incredibly slow throughput, barely a quarter of the speed I had been seeing. So, I decided to upgrade BE to SP3+hotfixes for v12.5d, now I didn't install every one of the hot fixes because I couldn't down load some of them but I did install those hot fixes that I could get downloaded, I also ran the cleaning tape on the drive. After installing SP3+hotfixes I had downloaded, repushing the BE remote agent out to all servers we backup and running a cleaning job, everything seemed to go just fine with that process and I then tried running the weekly/monthly backup jobs again, same results, slow throughput. We have a Quantum DLT-S4 drive and I have been working with Quantum over the last week trying to figure out if we have a hardware or software (or possibly a network - even though nothing has changed except for what I have just mentioned) problem. Working with Quantum I have just ran one of my daily backup to tape jobs to one of the new tapes and the throughput on that was exactly where it should be, roughly 1,700 MB/min but when I ran one of the weekly/monthly backup jobs to the same tape I only got througput of only 600MB/min where on the weekend I usually see throughput of approx. 1,600MB/min for the same job. Now it could be that because I ran this test while the entire company is using the network during the day why I have slow throughput unlike on the weekends so I'm going to run another test tonight to see but I'm wondering if anyone else has encountered a sceanrio like this. One question I have is 'do servers that get a new BE Remote Agent pushed to them need to be rebooted? Also, are one of the hot fixes associated with SP3 related to slow throughput issues and might reslove this throughput problem? Any suggestions anyone has would be very much welcomed as I don't understand what is going on here.
