Backup to disk very slow

[cnull]

I have BE 9.1 running on a compaq DL360 with dual 1.3Ghz P3 and 512MB RAM. The server is connected to a SAN (2GB fiber)and I have 600GB of drive space that I use as the backup to disk folder. When I backup to tape library, which is over the fiber, I get about 400MB - 500MB a min. But when I do a backup to disk I start at about 250MB and slowly get down to about 10MB per min. I have never finished a backup to disk due to the slow throughput. I had always thought that backup to disk was faster. Also I found that the server becomes almost impossible to control.

My best guess is that I need more memory, which I intend on trying, but how much? and is that really going to fix the problem?

Thank you in advance!

 

[stevet3]

What I would try first is from you ML360 find a file/folder of about 1 gig. In windows explorer copy it over to the shared disk or your SAN drive. Time it on a watch and watch how long it takes windows to copy it.
If it calculates out to the same rate in BE then is something outside of backup exec. Only other thing I can think of if you have software compression turned on for the backup to disk job and maybe its taking longer to compress the data than the library drives compressing the data.

 

[cnull]

I tried a folder that had almost exactly 1GIG of data on the local hard drive. I copied it to the SAN drive and it took aprox. 90 sec. That is about 11MB/sec or 660MB/min. That is not good over fiber. I also tried it from a mapped network drive to the SAN drive and had almost the exact same speed. I double checked the compression settings and I have only hardware compression turned on. I set it to no compression and noticed a jump up to 410MB/min. That does not really make sense to me since hardware compression usually refers to the compression provided by the tape drive itself.

Not a bad improvement! I would however like to see it reach some higher numbers. Especially since it is running over a Gigabit network to a fiber attached SAN drive.

 

[stevet3]

So basically the problem is outside of backup exec at this point. Im assuming if you picked more than a gig it would eventually drop off to 250mb in windows as you reported.
Try NTBACKUP to disk. Run a larger job as you would with backup exec. Another test is to take that 1 gig backup folder and run a backup to disk job in Backup Exec to a local backup to disk folder on the ML server and see what happens. Have you updated HBA drivers, firmware, etc?

 

[comtec17]

The one thing to remember here is that the data will only copy as fast as the slowest point. I would suggest you walk the path and take notes. I have found that majority of the time the system bus is the issue.