General Question: performance brick level

[waanders]

Hi Guys,

People asked me to find out why Brick level backup is slow... Seems to be a simple question, but in my opinion it's not..

Case: Backup server, W2K Server and Backup software (veritas ore arcserve, its not important). Exchange server is another server. I want to optimize the performance of the brick level backup. What factors are important to increase the performance/throughput of the backup... faster cpu? more memory?

Has anybody any idea? ore does anybody know a website which can me explain me what to do..

Robert Waanders
Network Engineer ITON (the netherlands)

 

[gwichman]

seems pretty common sense to me. In the one case you're backing up the entire database. I don't know the inner workings of how the MS API's function but it's not unreasonable to compare that to brick level where you're backing up each individual folder and mail, one at a time, and see how the later would be slower. MS doesn't provide an API to do brick level so these companies (veritas and ca) provide functionality to do it. It's likely the software has to open each individual mail for each user and back them up on the fly. Thats quite a bit of overhead if you think about it.

As for increasing performance i'd recommend visiting the respective forum (BE or arcserv) on any specifics in that regard. As with any application though, one thing you can do is monitor the system during the brick level backup and see whether it's cpu bound, io bound, network bound, or memory bound. If you can determine it is bound in any of those categories then yes purchasing faster hardware in that category would certainly be of benefit.

e.g. if you determine it's io bound (disk is extremely active and throughput of disk is close to what disk is capable of in specs), buying a faster disk would likely benefit you or buying additional disk and using RAID0 to increase disk throughput.

But i would visit the appropriate forum and try the question there. Someone may have personal experience in the matter for that software.

 

[MostlyNuts]

Since the systems has to walk through each item to backup individually, as compared to the database as one item, it makes sense that it would take longer. There are solutions out there for this like Email Archive from OTG or another like product.
Check 'em out...