Backup speeds

[iain99]

Hi, I currently have 2 tape drives directly attached to my backup server by scsi cable. Is it worth changing to fibre connection? Will my backups go seriously quicker or is it restricted by how quickly the drive itself can write to tape?
Any experiences of this out there? Thanks.

 

[LeeMason]

What sort of backup drive do you have?


Lee Mason
Optimal Projects Ltd

http://www.opl.co.uk

http://www.backupsanywhere.com

 

[iain99]

Sorry didint notice your respone til now. We have 2 HP LTO3 drives.

 

[Martin999]

Well, I will admit I've never really taken notice of possible speeds via scsi to LTO3.

A fibre connected LTO 3 would probably write on average around 80-90 MB/s.

However, if what you have does the job ok, why spend the moeny.

Martin

 

[iain99]

It does do the job, I just wondered if the performance of fibre was way better...
Thanks for the response.

 

[Martin999]

OK, so what performance are you getting now, and are the backups compressed, if so, are they compressed using hardware or software.

 

[iain99]

Well at the moment with the scsi LTO3 we're getting around 11mb a second and thats using Veritas Netbackup which compresses as it goes (if the files arent already compressed..)

 

[Martin999]

Ok, well fibre will definately be quicker. I would not use compression in Netbackup, any 'software' compression will be slow (not a fault of Netbackup).

Providing you can get the data off the machine quick enough fibre will be much quicker. Use the hardware comprssion of the drive and you should see a vast improvement.

Martin

 

[iain99]

Ok I'll see if I can get some money to spend....thanks a lot Martin.