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Off-site copy performance problems

Formula84
Level 3

Hello, We have deployed BESR 2010 to 3 clients so far, the latest has a 230GB Drive to do the Base image took about 2.25 Hours.  This finished @ 1:15am but the Off-site copy did not finish till 7:48am thats over 6.5 Hours when the entire backup took only 1/3rd of that?  I do have verirify turned on but I am not sure if that is part of the Job process or if the verify is running silently in the background after the 1:15am completion... Any help would be appreciated.  Oh for reference took a look at the other clients 68GB backup and this took 33 min to complete but the off-site copy did not complete till about 1.5 hours later... So seems to be the trend that the Off-site copy take 3 time longer to complete than the backup itself.  Is there a more granular log to look at, as currently the backups show start and finish but the offi-site does not show a start time just a completion... I already have the logging turned up to the highest in settings I believe.
6 REPLIES 6

alex_rose
Level 4
I agree that offsite copy seems to be very slow. My investigations into offsite copy for another issue I had leads me to believe that the BESR architecture puts most of the work onto the "remote agent", in fact it would be more correct to describe the console as a "control agent" that just tells the agent on the servers what to do.

I strongly suspect that an offsite copy involves the agent on the server dragging the data across the network from the onsite backup location and then sending it to the offsite location.

So for my setup where I have a DR server backing up a DATA server we have the situation where the DATA server writes the data to a hard drive on the DR server for the onsite backup. The offsite drives are USB devices attached to the DR server (as I'm backing up multiple servers, I don't want to have to stick a USB drive into each server I'm backing up) and I strongly suspect that when doing the offsite backup the agent on DATA grabs the data off the onsite harddrive in DR over the network then pushes it back over the network to the USB device on DR.

The fact that when using the console to define offsite backup locations for a remote server you can only specify the locations as network drives supports my supposition that the software works this way. Of course nobody at Symantec will confirm this - I'm sticking a Gigabit backbone between the servers at this site to see if this speeds up transfer and will report back here.

alex_rose
Level 4
Sorry for the long delay in getting this update on here.

For anybody that's interested changing the switch that connected the servers to a gigabit one made lots of difference. It seems that offsite backups get pulled from the backup location to the server being backed up and then pushed out to the offsite location. In my case that meant pulling them from the dr server's drive array across the network and then pushing them back over the network to the dr server's USB drives - really efficient!

criley
Moderator
Moderator
Employee Accredited

Alex,

I'm looking into this. Will post back here once I have some news for you on this.

criley
Moderator
Moderator
Employee Accredited

I looked into this and it appears that BESR basically moves the recovery point from the backup destination to the source server and then copies it to the offsite copy location - this clearly explains the performance problems you describe.

We are in the process of logging a request to see if the code can be changed so this process is more efficient. This may take some time but we are aware of the issue and your concerns so thanks for reporting this.

Let me know if you have any further questions on this subject.

Matthew_Banks
Not applicable
Partner

Chris

1. Do you know if the code has been changed yet? Or if not when it will be? I only ask as I'm using BESR to image eight servers and the current way BESR works means a lot of data heading over the network.

2. It would seem that if you are using the BESR Managment Solution you can configure a Dedicated Offsite Copy Task and assign this task to a single computer. This single computer is then responsible for copying images from onsite destination to offsite desination. Is there any way to configure a Dedicated Offsite Copy Task when you aren't using BESR Managment Solution?

criley
Moderator
Moderator
Employee Accredited

Matthew,

1. It's not been changed yet and I can't give you any timeframe I'm afraid. Sorry.

2. No. You can only do this with BESR-MS.