Slow

[Kent_Wyatt]

I am looking to improve the speed of my backup. We recently went through some infrastructure changes that were not releated to backup speed but I certainly thought they would have and impact and have not. This leads me to believe something is causing slow backups.

In our old environment, we had NT4 servers with PIII 400MHz, 2G RAM servers with single 100M NICs connected with 100M switches. I would see a rate at 100-400MB/min.

In our new environment, we have Win2k3 servers with 3.4GHz Xeon, 4G RAM with dual teamed gig NICs connected to gigabit switches. I see the exact same rates.

In both environments, backup exec is running on a NAS1500 from HP with a 3.2GHZ processor and 2G of RAM. It has dual gigabit NICs connected to the same gigabit switch.

We do a backup to disk then duplicate to tape. The duplicate to tape runs a hair slower, so 100-350MB.min.

This all seems way too slow to me. These are basic file servers and do not have much activity, if any, during back up.

I definately expected some improvement with the infrastructure changes, though luckily this wasn't the reason for the changes.

Anyone with any thoughts?

[Gilly-Bhoy]

Kent,

Are all your Switch Ports and NIC's hard set to 1Gb Full Duplex?
If not change them and see does the speed improve.

Gilly

[Hywel_Mallett]

There are 2 issues here - the slow backup to the NAS device, and the slow backup to tape.
100Mb ethernet will give you about 600 MB/min backup rates when maxed out, so it does indeed sound sub-optimal. The first thing to do is to find out whether the slow speeds are due to the network/hardware. What speeds do you get just copying files from one device to another?
Secondly, the tape backup doesn't sound very fast, but you don't tell us what tape hardware you have.
WIth getting roughly the same data rate for both, I wonder if it could be something to do with the disk-access on the NAS? Perhaps a RAID problem (tape drive connected to theRAID card?), or heavily fragmented B2D files (which is known to be a problem, resolved with a hotfix).
Try running a test backup straight to tape from the fileservers. What data rate do you get?

[Kent_Wyatt]

Thanks for the response.

The tape drive is a HP Ultrium 1/8 Autoloader

I tested setting the NAS, Switch, and a server to fixed 1G/Full and it appears to have had no effect.

A direct to tape job runs at 1300MB/min

The NAS device is SATA and the tape drive SCSI on a seperate controller obviously.

Not sure how accurate this is but using a speed test utility to copy files across the network logged the speed at 80MB/s.

[shweta_rege]

Hello,



Kindly refer the following Documents:


Reasons why the data throughput rate can be slower than the theoretical maximum when backing up to tape media


http://support.veritas.com/docs/231488



How to correct slow backup performance, slow virus or pre-job scans, and agent initialization problems on fragmented Windows NT, Windows 2000, and Windows 2003 server partitions


http://support.veritas.com/docs/237444

What Backup Exec settings can be modified to reduce the amount of time it takes for a backup to run?


http://support.veritas.com/docs/249090


Thank You,


Shweta