Speeding up Backup to disk over network

[Lesta_G]

As you know... I am running backup exec 2010 R3 with AVVI agent.

Currently we backup VM using AVVI to local disk on the media server and then duplicate to tape.

We are looking to move the backup to disk to a network share on another server.

The media server is multihomed.

I have set up a test job to backup  a 20Gb image file to the backup-to-disk folder ( a network share)

this backup job uses about 60% of the network bandwidth

If i take the same file and copy it to the network share using windows copy it uses 100% of the network bandwidth. This 100% use is desirable as the network segment is only being used for this backup purpose.

Any suggestions on how to "make" BE use 100% of the bandwidth?

Currently the "NAS" does not have the windows backup agent installed on it. Would this make any difference? (i expect not as it is not being backed up)

[newsolutionBE]

Hi

Remote agent is not required on NAS regarding the speed what happen if you make remote b2d on server instead of NAS

Thanks

[CraigV]

Hi Lesta,

You firstly need to check the speed of the NAS NICs, and generally they're all 1GB. Hard-code the speed of your media server NICs, the switch ports they plug into, as well as the NAS NICs (if possible) and the switch ports they plug into to the fastest the devices are capable of. This takes care of auto-negotiate being an issue.

Once done, I'd suggest sending more than 1 job to the NAS...Doing so should saturate the bandwidth available to you and allow you to write more data to the NAS. You can do this by running 2 test jobs at the same time.

Thanks!

[DoubleEM]

Not too sure how to force the nic to work at 100%.

But you may try to play around with the buffered read and write, as well as the nic porperties to increase the throughput.

Refer to the link below:

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=DOC3276

Hope it's helping. Thx

[Sush---]

Refer to these technotes too

http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH49521 : Improving and troubleshooting Backup Exec performance

http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH70346 : List of backup or restore Performance TechNotes (troubleshooting slow throughput backups and restores) for Backup Exec Products

Thanks,

-Sush...

[Lesta_G]

Thanks Craig,

I can already saturate the link with a windows copy to the same file share, so i am not sure forcing the linkspeed to 1GB will make any difference?

I will try out the mupltiple concurrent  backups idea to see if that changes it.

[teiva-boy]

Concurrent streams will do it..

Alternatively, do you think that perhaps it's your VMware backup that is the bottleneck?  In your windows file copy test you are copying from BE server to UNC path.  In a VMware backup, you are going from VMware host over SAN/NBD, which goes THROUGH the BE server, then to UNC to the B2D location.  Extra copy operations of the data and points of contention along the way...

[Lesta_G]

for testing, to eliminate network issues.....I am doing a very basic backup test that eliminates VMWare, SAN etc

Copying the same file from the backup server to the NAS results in 100% utilisation of the network

Backing up the same file on the backup server to the NAS results in 50% utilisation of the network

Once I get his solved (yeah right! :) i will then throw in VMWare products, but at the moment I am back to basics ;)