All,

Thanks for the reactions. Veritas gave me two hints to determine the
maximum velocity of an Exchange backup; see how fast a Xmerge performs,
and the old trick from the performance guide: dump to a null device.
Once you have determined the maximum speed that bpbkar can read the data
with, no matter what you do, you won't get any more performance without
tweaking Exchange. That is, per stream. Multiple streams can provide
significant gains, but there is a limit to the amount of streams that
can be handled by MAPI. So now I am looking for ways to increase
Exchange performance.

We are using LTO drives, the backups go over a gigabit NIC. Everything
seems to be tweaked normally. It is still Exchange 5.5, that's the
reason why I still want to do bricklevels. No recovery group available,
and the store is a bit to big to keep a complete staqndby recovery
server available.

We are reaching five streams of 1 MB/s each at the moment. Not enough
for streaming, now considering disk staging in order to save the drives.

Regards,

Marcel