How to get both Cloning and Backup Performance

[MDDTech]

Are there any articles or advice on adjusting Networker to get a balance performance between backup and cloning? I’ve read thru the Tek Tip threads, Networker Performance Tuning everything leans to onside or the other. Either you get backup performance and cloning is slow or visa versa.

My current environment is Networker 7.1.1, W2K3 SP1, 4 - 1.2 GHz processor with 4 Gb memory server, 12 - SDLT ATL.

 

[1018DADA]

First you may benifit by looking at more faster CPU for your server.
Check any updates to your SCSI cards or improvements.
Dont know how much you backup and how, from what you have 12 drives, it seems there is lots to backup, i think you should look at VTL solution so that you can backup faster and clone through VTL vs tapes.
consider storage node or spliting your phisical library in two and having a secound instant of backup server.

 

[MDDTech]

The server is not taxed, and adding new hardware is not an option; I am looking to adjust settings in Networker to get the optimal performance. Most of the guidelines are very fag

 

[goony]

Do you do backups to disk?

I have a raid 1+0 setup and I backup clients to disk, which runs very fast. Immediately after the client completes, the cloning to tape starts. This way there is no tape contention with backups waiting for clone tapes to complete.

When the disk gets too full savesets are automatically 'staged' to tape in a separate tape pool from the clone tapes.

This also has the advantage if a minor file recovery is needed and the backup is fairly recent then there is a good chance that the requested file is still on the disk, thus a prompt recovery.

I used this site to figure out the best raid configuration for my disks:

http://tinyurl.com/27h8h

 

[MDDTech]

Unfortunately I don’t backup to disk, I have 6.5 TB of nightly backups to complete. I’ve think I have found the optimal setting client 4/device 6/server 48. It seems from everything I found that these setting are best tuned by trail and error. You would think there would be some tools to help tune your system; maybe the market is too small.