Hello Eddie,

I was happy to see your other reply -- I was going to make the same
warning about limitations of brick-level backups.

For MB backups: this is a very CPU-intensive process, with a small
amount of data per process going back to NetWorker Server.  As speed is
your primary concern, your best bet is to make as many different backup
processes as you can, and keep parallelism high.  Most Exchange Servers
can comfortably handle 6 backup jobs at once, and I remember hearing
from one customer years ago (I think in this mail list) that they were
using 20 processes.

Storage nodes will not usually be the bottleneck for MSEXCH:MB jobs.

Hope that this helps,
_Scott

-----Original Message-----
From: EMC NetWorker discussion [mailto:NETWORKER AT LISTSERV.TEMPLE DOT EDU] On
Behalf Of Albert Eddie Contractor AFRPA CIO/IT
Sent: Friday, January 12, 2007 12:18 PM
To: NETWORKER AT LISTSERV.TEMPLE DOT EDU
Subject: [Networker] Exchange Performance Tweaks

On my way out the door, I am going to ask "Is there is a better way?"

Current
The Mailbox Exchange Backups are setup as two groups:
     Exchange mbfull a - m
     Exchange mbfull n - z

Parallelism is set to 6

We have a gigE network with dual cards in the servers one for the server
network traffic and one for the user network traffic.

The setup/performance questions are...

Currently let's say there are THREE storage nodes:

Hq1
Hq2
Hq3

The mailboxes are NOT setup by any pattern, not by group, not by
alphanumeric, no rhyme no reason. But the data load is balanced between
the three storage nodes.

The question is Speed-Speed-Speed!

We want the fastest backups possible, while keeping in mind that we want
to be able to restore fast so the user who deleted his bosses critical
files folder can get that folder RESTORED fast as well.

Do you make more STORAGE NODEs?

Do you change the backup and parrallelism down to the storage node
numbers and backup the storage nodes instead of a-m, etc...?

What are your thoughts?

Oh and Happy 3 day weekend to my fellow Gov't Employees/Contractors!

Semper Fidelis et Paratus! /ALE

Eddie Albert, SinSei of SANs - (703) 696-5509

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