Backing up business data to tape

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enhanced08

Weaksauce
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Feb 21, 2006
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Im looking for some info on backing up data in a business environment. Basically we have multiple servers which are backed up to our backup server. Then this server runs Symantec Backup Exec and copys the data to tape. We have roughly 5TB of data in a full, weekend backup. This takes 60+ hours to complete and we are adding a fair amount more data over the next year. Even our nightly incremental backups are nearly 1TB and take 12 hours...

Looking at the stats on our LTO-4 drives, it should be capable of 120MB/s uncompressed data transfer. I realize that this is not a real world speed but Im calculating that our transfer speed is roughly 22MB/s which is much slower. Im trying to speed things up but I dont know if this is normal or there is a bottleneck somewhere in the system.

The backup server consists of:
(2) Opteron 4162 EE cpus
16GB ram
Im not sure how the HDDs are configured as I did not set them up, but I believe its 8 x 600GB drives in RAID5.

The tape drive is connected to the system via a 6Gb/s SAS cable.


Im looking at this and thinking that there has to be companies out there with more data than we have. Im just curious as to their backup solutions. Is ours flawed or just at its max capacity/speed?

Thanks!
 
What tape drive are you using? The tape is capable of 120MB/s, but the drive may not be.

drescherjm raises a good point, too. You may want to look into imaging instead of doing tape. It's much faster.
 
Both valid points.

Looking at some of the data, Im seeing about 2.5TB worth of data contained within about 3.5 million files, so maybe 7 million in total? Not 10's of millions but a decent amount.

Im not sure the exact model of drive off the top of my head but thats something I can look into. I just assumed it would run at the same speed as the drives its designed for.
 
A few questions:

What is the physical environment? How many Servers and such?
What types of Files are they?
Is there any virtualization?
What version of BackupExec?
 
The tape drive is a Dell PowerVault 124T: http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/powervault-124t-lto4hh/pd that page shows it capable of 120MB/s...

Physically we have a mix of things, maybe close to 30 servers, a few physical but mostly virtual. All connected to each other with a 1GB switch. roughly 20 of the servers are setup on a SAN and use Veeam to backup data to the backup server where it is then copied to tape. The remaining 10 servers use either CPS or Backup Exec to copy directly to tape.

Files are a mix of everything from email messages, jpgs, .doc/xls files, email archive files (.pst) some SQL dump files, etc

We use BE2010. We looked at 2012 but were not impressed by the issues some have had with it.
 
The new version of Veeam, version 7, is supposedly able to backup directly to tape, that might work well in your environment, however upgrading might not be so small a task.
 
I've been using BackupExec and Arcserve with LTO2,3,4 tape libraries (HP SCSI connected and Dell iSCSI and SAS connected) for many years and I have never seen my backups go over 2000MByte/minute on write (read/verify can be up to 5000MByte/minute). We even use multiplexing datastreams from several servers to one tape job with Arcserve and we're still stuck at ~1600MByte/minute on the full backup (around 4TB of mixed size files, as you).

Must be a limitation in Windows somewhere as all the individual parts (disks, SCSI/SAS connections, tapedrives etc) are capable of much higher speed.

I think companies with significantly larger datasets have major databases, not filesystems, and/or are using Unix/Linux.
 
Have you done any sort of performance tuning with BE? The default settings for the tape drives in BE will generally give you some pretty poor performance. I get around 6-7000MB/min with my nightly LTO4 backups, and some LTO5 backups I ran last week topped out around 14000MB/min. This on a Windows server, so the OS is definitely not a limitation.

If backing up from server to tape directly over the network, I could see the slow speeds, but with the OP doing B2D2T, should definitely be getting higher speeds than that.

Here's my BE tape drive config, probably a good place to start. Just about any tape drive in use today should work fine with these settings. If you want more performance you can increase the block size as well, but in my case it was a pretty small increase, so I just left it at the default.
IBdTYtG.png
 
I'll give those settings a try tonight. Ive never tried to tune it at all, everything is set to default settings. Thanks for the tip!
 
Hello Enhanced 08,

Do you run any other backup jobs? if so are you seeing similar speeds across all jobs or is it only this job that sees slower through put speeds? if you ran the job without the duplication to tape..lets say a test job without the duplication to tape to speeds increase? Please review the following documentation as it details troubleshooting performance issues in relation to bakcup exec.

http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH49521
 
JBark said:
Have you done any sort of performance tuning with BE? The default settings for the tape drives in BE will generally give you some pretty poor performance. I get around 6-7000MB/min with my nightly LTO4 backups, and some LTO5 backups I ran last week topped out around 14000MB/min. This on a Windows server, so the OS is definitely not a limitation.

If backing up from server to tape directly over the network, I could see the slow speeds, but with the OP doing B2D2T, should definitely be getting higher speeds than that.

Here's my BE tape drive config, probably a good place to start. Just about any tape drive in use today should work fine with these settings. If you want more performance you can increase the block size as well, but in my case it was a pretty small increase, so I just left it at the default.
IBdTYtG.png
Click to expand...

I finally got the chance to try these settings, however if anything the backup seems a bit slower. Can you explain what these settings are and how I should fine tune them further based on my system/data? Or point me to information on it?

Ive also looked though the link above and will try separating the job into smaller jobs to see if I can spot the 'slow' data.
 
are you backing up over your network, or are you going over your FC San?
 
kdh, The data is moved across the network via a different backup job, no issues there. Once the data has moved to the backup server it is then written to tape, which is the slow process.

On another note I have setup a test job that consists of about 350GB worth of VM backups in 5 files or so. The rate so far is over 6000MB/s so the issue may be that there are so many smaller files. Im going to look into adding more servers to our Veeam backup and then write that data to tape.

EDIT: Job completed: 360GB of data, 21 files, 8 directories, 1hr 4min to complete at about 5500MB/sec. MUCH faster!
 
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