Using Fibre to backup

[Chris_Pavey]

I recently installed Fibre to increase the speeds of backups but it appears that the fibre connection only gets used when backup verifies.

Is there any way to force veritas to use fibre to backup?

At the moment the Backup library has a fibre link to a server where Veritas v11d lives. All servers have a fibre connection and a 10/100 NIC. All clients are using the 10/100 side of the network.

Thank you

Chris 

[Hywel_Mallett]

More information!
Do you mean everything has a fibre-channel connection, so you have a SAN in place? If so, then BE will use the network for backups, as this is how it works as standard. If your data are stored on a SAN-attached disk array, then you could use the Advanced Disk-based Backup Option to use Off-Host backups.
This means that your hosts create a snapshot of the data on their array drives. This snapshot is then imported by the BE media server and backed up from there. Note that you must be able to create transportable snapshots for this to work.

If you mean you've got a fibre-based network between the servers, then you'd need to tell the backups which network to use, using the Network and Firewall option.

[Michael_McKenne]

On CAT 5e, you can do 1000 Mbps over 100 meters.  

1,000 Mbps = 60,000 MB per minute = 125 MB / second  

On my Dlink DGL-4300 router I get around 890-924 Mbps on speed tests.   It is still beyond the 24 Mbps of a tape drive.   My Exabyte VXA-320 maintained 720 MB/min (12Mbps) across the router with no problem.  

Unless you are backing up over miles you don't need fiber for a backup.    CAT 5e copper is sufficient for backup jobs.  

If you bandwidth is filled with other traffic, that could be an issue.   You might need a larger pipe or second backup network.   I used to put a second subnet just for backups with 1 Gbps NICs on CAT 5e to a 12 port 1 Gbps full duplex switch.   No routing between NICs on each box.   Users on their subnet and backups on 1 Gbps network.