Transfer rate issue

[kennyb]

we have a full backup that spans 2 LTO-3 tapes, once the second tape gets going, the backup is very slow to complete.
The transfer rate is at 370-400+ mb/sec but it takes a VERY long time to complete.

I know a few factors might be the data is transferring during production hours, the connection for the remote agent has an issue, the physical hardware of the server (2gig should be more than enough)
I noticed that the BE server is running very low on memory and spiking at the cpu on a 2 cpu dual-core.

It doesn't do this on the first tape drive though, another LTO-3.

Any other thoughts? A Virus or spyware perhaps?



thanks.

[CraigV]

Hi Kenny,

Streaming to 2 drives or the same drive?
When it starts with the second tape, what type of data is it backing up? Multiple small files will make your transfer speed slower, but if it's over say a 100MB connection (a particular server/s), that would also be a cause.
that transfer rate is a bit low.
I have attached 2 websites to read up on as well:

http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/231488.htm

http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/285756.htm

[kennyb]

streaming to a single drive, but spanning 2 tapes on a single drive (Quantum lto-3). So it takes two 400/800 tapes to do a full weekend

backup. Once I put in that second tape on monday mornings, it just seems to slow way down in terms of transferring the data even though the transfer

rate says it's 400+mb/sec. It could be due to activity on the network with users, it never use to take this long.


the 2 servers in question are on a gig switch so it shouldn't  be a traffic issue between the hardware.


thanks for the links.

[CraigV]

Can you post a screen shot of your selection list order? You can remove server names/IP addresses etc. Might be worth your while looking at that, and prioritising a file server above an Exchange server for example. Lots of small files are going to slow down backup speeds compared to a large file.