Hi,

We are getting ready for our first disaster recovery test this weekend
using
ADSM as our exclusive backup utility. We have been doing some test
restores,
and things are looking pretty gloomy. Our major focus is WindowsNT, but
other platforms seem to be having problems also.

The systems that we are testing have very large numbers (some in excess of
1
million) of active backup files on a single filespace, most of which are
very small. So we expect some amount of delay before data starts moving on
a
restore. But we are seeing extremely poor performance. One of the test
restores, for an entire volume, resulted in 1.3 files per second being
restore. When you talk about 1 million files, that is a long time. Another
test, this time for only one directory tree, restored 143 files in 38
minutes; much worse. This second restore we see very long pause times with
no noticable activity; no volume mounts, the session in 'Run' state, and
the
GUI (yes, I know that the the command line may give better performance but
I
tried the command line and saw no noticable difference) showing the same
filename being processed and the status bar showing no data transferred for
that file. I then did a contrived test by backing up a set of files to a
disk pool, and then restoring them. This resulted in 11 files per second
being restored, which is getting close to acceptable.

So, I guess what I am after are some suggestions as to what I could try to
improve things, and some idea of what sort of performance others are
experiencing. Note that the restores are coming from systems that have been
ADSM clients for many months and therefore have data spread across multiple
(the worst that I have seen is 9) collacted volumes.

Our environment is:

*       ADSM Server 3.1.2.0 on AIX using an R50 server and 3590 drives in a
3494 library
*       WindowsNT 4.0 SP3 clients using 3.1.0.3


regards,

Trevor