Arcserve 2000 A/E Speed Query

[flatfour]

Hi

I have the following hardware:

Compaq DL320 Win2000 Server with a
Compaq 64/66 SCSI III Controller running a
HP 1/8 DLTvs80 Autoloader and of course
Arcserve 2000 A/E patched to the hilt

My question relates to speed: when backing up itself I see an average of 160Mb/min, when backing up a PII NT4 server on a 10Mb network card I see 44Mb/min (which I think is about right), when backing up another Proliant PIII NT4 server with loads of RAM and a 100Mb network card I see 10Mb/min. This is all with the client and BAOF agents.

Thing is I'm sure the Arcserve server should be quicker than 160, and the other Proliant is abysmal. In fact the compare on this machine runs at 1.6Mb/min: 3 hours for 330Mb!

Any ideas on getting the performance up? I've checked everything I can find for the drive, block size etc and the drivers are totally up to date for everything.

All help appreciated...

Bob Clarke
Mott MacDonald (UK) Ltd

 

[jabus]

Are the hard drives running on the same controller as the tape drives? Not sure about that model, but most intg'd SCSI controllers on Proliants are pretty slow when backing up. We see around that for local disks, then jumps to ~450MB/min when backing up SAN disks.

Even if a machine has loads of RAM, make sure it is not swapping when the backup is running slow. Also make sure your anti-virus program is not checking outbound files. Finally, make sure you have your duplexing set properly on your NIC's, switches, etc.

 

[flatfour]

Thanks Jabus

The host server has 1 18Gb SCSI hdd running off the on-board SCSI II controller, the changer is on the addin controller.

It has 256Mb, would you think that would make is swap a lot when backing up?

On the subject of duplexing, I have all our NICs set to full duplex although I've been reading this isn't so good for backups. Any thoughts?

Cheers

 

[flatfour]

Sorry, forgot to ask - do you mean to set the AV on the host server or the servers being backed up, or both?

ta