All,

  How much can you load a backup server? We have a backup server that is
doing that is backing up our Oracle and SQLserver servers. Between
filesystem backups, Oracle RMAN level 0's, level 1's and archive log backups
(hourly!) our backup server is running over 4000 jobs per day. My general
opinion is that this is probably excessive.

  The backup server is a master/media server. It is an HP N4000 with 4 cpus,
8GB RAM running 3.2GA. The system has 3 Gigabit Ethernet NIC's on 3 separate
subnets for backing up 85 clients. We are probably backing up over 60 Oracle
servers running, probably, over 120 instances of Oracle. We are running to
an STK L700 with 16 DLT7000's, SCSI attached.

  The system cpu utilization seems to be fine, all 4 cpus seem to run about
70% idle during heavy load. There is plenty of memory available. The buffer
configurations have been tuned. It doesn't appear that we have overloaded
the network, the backplane or the tape drives.

  We are starting to see various problems that would normally make an SA
think of system loading. (The server is also crashing once in a while.
Support seems to believe that is related to a GigE driver issue.)

  Does anyone else have similarly loaded backup servers? Do they handle this
ok? Or do you start deploying media servers at a certain point?

  Any suggestions would be helpful.

     Bryan

Bryan Bahnmiller
Agilent Technologies
bryan_bahnmiller AT agilent DOT com