Brightstore Ver 9 - Porr Network Tough Put

[Nightwatch]

Hello,

We have recently installed Computer Associates BrightStore Arcserve V.9. We have also upgraded our back up unit to a single drive Exabyte 215M. You'd think with newer equipment and software things would be great. They're not. We are experiencing rather poor performance and backups are taking a lot longer than anticipated. In fact our older Arcserve 6.61 with a single Exabyte M1 drive is doing a better job. Here is a list of the equipment in use and configuration:

Server: Compaq Proliant 1600R Dual PII-450 512 MB RAM, 29 GB Free disk space. 4 Network cards.

O/S: Windows 2000 Server SP3

Back Up Software: CA BrightStore Arcserve V9.

Back Up Equipment: Exabyte 215M

-Each server being backed up has the latest back up agent and is running NT SP6a.

-I have configured 2 jobs: NT1, 18 servers about 330 GB of data, Friday Full, followed by incrementals. Job 2, NT2, 6 Servers about 30 GB of data, Full Backup only once a week.

Problem: Job NT1 takes almost a complete week end to finish while network activity is extremely low. Average through put on some servers is as low as 30 MB/min complete. I'm also experiencing the performance on the NT2 job. Some servers do show good performance on certain volumes with leads me to believe that the performance may be related to the type of data being backed up.

I’ve checked the cards polarity and they are running at Full Duplex 100mb.

I would appreciate any comments or suggestions.

Regards

Paul

 

[Nightwatch]

The title should have read "Poor Performance". Spelling has been a bit of a challenge of late.

 

[ssoulages]

Poor performance can be attributed to several things:
- File Size: More tiny files back up slower than the same amount of data made up of fewer large files
- Drive speed
- Fragmentation: Heavily fragmented drives back up SLOW
- mismatch between switch and NIC speed/duplex setting
- Crosstalk/noise/etc on network due to RF/EMI, or bad NIC

Try logging some performance stats during a backup and see if any bottlenecks show up; ram, processor, pagefile, etc

We installed a separate GB network just for our backups on a different subnet for the same reason. Though some machines are still dismally slow (Exchange and old PC's with IDE drives still ran around 60MB/min), it freed up the faster ones to really fly (one server ran 24GB at 1,346.68MB/min), so our backup window is still better than it was.