Enhancing Exchange 2007 backup performance

[Wile_E__Coyote]

Running a dedicated NB6.5 media server with a single HP LTO3 drive connected to backup our Exchange 2007 environment. I believe this is considered an "online" backup of Exchange 2007.

Originally, the backup was taking 20 hours. They reduced it to 12 hours by turning on compression. Since then the backup time has gradually and steadily grown back to 21 hours. On its current rate of growth it will take over 24 hours to complete a single backup within a few weeks.

We're working with a support organization who is walking us through troubleshooting the issue. They have, so far, proven that it is not a performance bottleneck at the drive, media server and network levels. The media server spends a lot of time sitting and waiting for data from the Exchange server.

What can be done to improve performance here?

[Jim_Miller]

First some questions need to be answered:

1. How many Exchange servers?

2. What is total size of databases?

3. How many storage groups?

4. What kind of disk subsystem are databases on? (Number of spindles, drive speed)

5. Please list the contents of your backup selections tab for the Exchange policy.

[Wile_E__Coyote]

1. One, or two. How do you count a clusterered pair of servers?

2. The servers have 2.4TB of disk space. Activity monitor shows about 1TB of data being backed up a night.

3. No idea. Nobody that's here knows what I'm talking about. I think it was installed by some cut-rate professional service that slapped it together, got it working, and left.

4. EMC Symmetrix. The data is on literally hundreds of 15K RPM spindles, striped across RAID5 storage.

5. "Microsoft Information Store:\*"

[Wile_E__Coyote · Accepted solution]

UPDATE: We were able to reduce backups from 21 to 7.5 hours by implementing multistreaming.