Low Throughput Backing up Exchange Database

[hindgrinder]

I have an Exchange database that is 250Gb and growing. When I back it up at night it can take up to 11 hours to backup and had a throughput of 25GB/Hour.

All the other backups done nightly have a much higher throughput, up to 100 GB/H.

Any ideas?

Thanks

 

[baddos]

Are you backing up the database or mailboxes? I know mailboxes take longer to backup than the database because of the MAPI process involved.

 

[hindgrinder]

Just the database at this point. I dont have any backups scheduled for the mailboxes

 

[arsponger]

hindgrinder,

This is typically network, or hardware related. Commvault has two tools in the resource kit that can help you troubleshoot this.

Disk Read: Test Read/Write performance.
Test Port: Test Network performance.

You could also use NT backup to backup the exchange db's and see if its comparable to the commvault backup.

When performing these tests make sure that you are performing them from your exchange server to the media agent that is involved in the backup.

If a tape library is involved I believe a tape validation can tell you the throughput of the tape media.

Thanks
ARS

 

[Frbutler]

I broke out my SG's into separate subclients
SG1 - SG4 and I get between 50-60gb/hour on each
I run the concurrently and they are all about 200-220gb.

Are you running them all as a single job?
You should break them out if so

Do you do disk staging? or are you dumping straight to tape?

Hope this helps

 

[hindgrinder]

I will try using 3 Subclients to see if this helps at all. The daily backups go to disk then on the weekend I aux copy the last full to tape for d/r purposes.

To answer the previos post (sorry it took so long), i dont believe its a hardware issue, I have throughput of up to 100GB/hr+ on other jobs run on the same night.

On a side note....
That last time we rebooted our mail server during the day, that evening the backup only took 5 hours and not the 12 it normally took.

 

[hindgrinder]

I set it up yesterday to use separate subclients for the storage groups and set the multiplexing and the entire backup of out mail server took 3.5 hours, a far cry from the 12+ it used to do.

Thanks for that suggestion. It seems to be working.