What is proper setting for NT Server Properties?

[Suleiman]

What is the correct setting for Server properties in NT (under Network in Control Panel)? The choices are:

Minimize memory use
Balance
File server
Network applications

When using "Network applications" setting, performance is lousy to the tune of 1 Megabyte/second writing to disk, or tape.

When using &quot;File server&quot; setting however, performance is great 7+ MB per second, but with 8 sessions going at once, available memory goes from 450+MB to < 1MB and the system starts to swap, then throuput drops to less that 1MB/second.


I installed Legato 6.01 on dual PII Xeon 450 with 512MB memory, 512GB RAID, DLT7000 Jukebox and individual DLT7000 drives, running NT 4 SP6a.

The plan is to backup Sun=Full, Mo-Fr=Incremental, and
M-F=clone previous day and send to offsite storage. The 512GB RAID is to be used for Onsite pool for 1 week, while all tapes are kept offsite for 1 week, in case of disaster.

genious@technologist.com

 

[cfowler]

Suleiman,

We are running Networker 5.7.0.0 Build 112, reported to be one of the &quot;buggiest&quot; versions Legato threw out onto the market, if you can believe the tech support. I for one, lean toward this belief. We are soon upgrading to version 6.0.1.

Here's what we have. 600 GB worth of data for a full backup, including all file servers and database servers. We currently use Winnt 4.0 Sp6.a, with a Storagetek 9740 Timberwolf Autochanger housing 3x 9840 20GB native / 40 GB compressed, drives.

We currently backup our data at rates of anywhere from 23 - 35 GB/ hour. The average rate of transfer from any one client is around 11-18MB/sec.

I would suggest that you make certain your network cards are all set for 100MB / Full Duplex. You should also turn off &quot;Auto Negotiation&quot; on each of the appropriate ports on your switches. The ports should all be forced to 100MB/s / Full Duplex as well. However, in the case that you may be backing up a Session Wall, you will wish to force both the Network card on the Session Wall and the port it connects through to 100MB/s / Half Duplex. This is due the amount of small files. 100 000's of 1-3K files. Lots of overhead to back them up.

On our server, we also have a Gig-E network adapter. this will allow for multiple clients over a CAT5 network to attach without a decrease in performance. Make certain the drives you are using (Tape Drives) or whatever, to backup the data can handle the amount of data that you are pushing to the server over the pipe.

We have also separated our backup network. Two main reasons, 1. Fault tolerance, if one fails, we have the main corporate network we can backup through. 2. Load balancing, we can perform the backups on the file servers through the day and not affect any local network traffic.

However, when it comes down to Parallelism and Sessions per Tape Drive, we currently have a max setting on the server of 24, 3 tape drives each capable of 8 target sessions. As a rule of thumb, the technicians responded that you should add up the number of sessions your clients are attempting to use and not have more than 10 sessions waiting to write.

Keep in mind that with the parallelism, you have to wiegh the pros and cons. More parallelism = faster to backup but slower to restore, the less the parallelism the longer to backup but quicker to restore / recover.

Hope this helps. I believe in your scenario, the Network Adapter / Switch - Port settings are going show the greatest results at least from the initial change.

Good luck

CF