Dual Network Cards 4

[Hellooooooooo]

Hello Everyone,

I'm trying to speed up the time taken to complete our backups each night. Currently it’s taking about 10 hours to backup data from 2 servers.

Here’s the server setup:

Server 1: Win 2k, 1 NIC to network with Static IP. Running backup software with a SCSI Tape Drive.

Server 2: Win 2K, 1 NIC to network, Static IP. Running Exch 5.5

Server 3: Win 2K, 1 NIC to network, Static IP. Used as the data server.

Each server is a Dell 2650 with Dual 1 GB NIC's. The current network connection is 100mb

We are not allowed to setup an extra subnet or gateway. We also don't control our DNS.

Each night we have about 40-45 GB of differential data to backup. We also do database level, and brick level backups on a 22 GB exchange server.

I was wanting to use the 2nd NIC's to balance the load on the network, but reading some of the threads this will not be so simple, and I'm sure that our network switch will not support balancing protocols.

I'm going to try and get a gigabyte switch so that I can create a mini network using the 2nd NIC's, using the 10.x.x.x addressing.

Has anyone else used a setup like this, any pointers or don’t go there’s??

Any help or advice is always welcome.

 

[dberg35]

The gig switch might help a little, but you are backing up to tape. You might want to try an external hard drive solution this should be much faster.

 

[itsp1965]

I agree with dberg, you can get "decent" backups even on 100Mbit networks (trust me I support about 60 servers in this fashion) by employing backup to disk as virtual tape and then offline to tape. We use Tivoli Storage mgr, but you can also use Veritas among others
Hope this helps.

 

[Hellooooooooo]

Hello Guys.

Thanks for your help. I forgot to say that I was using Arcserve 11.5 as the backup software. I was thinking about this over the weekend and went into work today to find that the Tape Libary has passed away. so tonights backs are to disk, untill dell pitch up and fix the drive. I will have a good look at the backup logs in the morning to see the time it has taken for both backups. What does drag the time out is the brick level exchange backup. I have 90 gb of space on the backup server free set as Raid 5. I will see how the backups went and my try backing up to disk then off to tape.

Cheers

Marty

 

[kmcferrin]

Most companies do what you're talking about, ie, set up a separate network for backups using secondary NICs. And since you don't have a large number of servers, you make up IP addresses for them that are not part of a routed network in your office. Then you configure the secondary NIC with no default gateway, and you're set.

 

[Titleist]

Hellooooooooo,

The brick level Exchange backup is time consuming. You can back the Information Stores daily, it's alot quicker, and then do a weekly brick level on the weekend to speed things up.

John

 

[kmcferrin]

Are you using Exchange 2000 or 2003? If you're using 2003 then I would probably suggest getting rid of the brick level backups altogether (since 2003 has the recovery storage group).

 

[Hellooooooooo]

Hello Titleist.

I did play with the idea of just doing database backups and brick level on the weekend. the only problem is our 1300 users+ live out of there emails and we are always doing restores from the previous days tapes. I've just changed it so that users can recover their own deleted items now. This has helped us a bit, but I'm goging to have a look at putting the brick level onto local disk(got about 30gb free on the exchange box) then move them across to the backup server to save off to tape.

Marty

 

[kmcferrin]

I did play with the idea of just doing database backups and brick level on the weekend. the only problem is our 1300 users+ live out of there emails and we are always doing restores from the previous days tapes.

This just blows my mind. I have never had to do a restore of anything from anyone's mailbox that wasn't related to a lawsuit or internal security investigation. The largest Exchange deployment I ever worked on was about 55,000 users scattered around the world, and even then we only rarely got requests for mailbox restores that didn't fit the above criteria.

 

[Hellooooooooo]

Hello kmcferrin.

Thanks for the gen. Would you belive we are still living with a NT4 PDC + BDC's and exchange 5.5! The system is driven by the pen pushers. It creates a nightmare for us getting admin done. Not my problem for much longer as I'm moving to another outfit soon. The only good thing that happened was the email system crashing a few months back, and then discovering that our accounts people had not paid the gold support when another server had a h/w fail. Made everyone see why we ask for downtime on our servers.

Cheers

Marty

 

[kmcferrin]

Wow, talk about a nightmare. None of that software is even supported anymore these days. Well, good luck on the move then, hopefully you'll get more modern systems to work with.