Thank you both for your replies.
Marianne Indeed, SAN restore does appear to offer the poorest performance. We saw KB/Sec 35003 when using HotAdd, which is an improvement however still not satisfactory. We did try a "thick" SAN restore but only achieved KB/Sec 31887.
Mike The fastest backup rate we have achieved so far is KB/Sec 198041 and this was a SAN backup using NUMBER_DATA_BUFFERS = 1024. We have been playing around with buffers and although these appear to have great effect on backup performance, we do not see the same gains with restores. We have SIZE_DATA_BUFFERS_DISK = 1048576.
We have tried various combinations of restores to different environments / datastores / storage / ESX servers. We confirmed with Steelbytes utility that we have a read speed of 1GB/Sec on the MSDP storage.
As said, we are reasonably happy with backup performance just not restore. It seems that the buffers have little or no effect on restore speeds. We also triued a restore with removing the NIC but saw no improvement.
Could I ask you both what sort of performance you have seen when restoring vm's?
I think I'll raise a ticket with Veritas support.
Thanks for your help,
Graham