> During the backup window the backups use all 6 of my tape drives in my
> environment.

Okay.

> Since the process to copy the tapes only leaves 3 available it
> takes twice the amount of time it took to backup the servers to do
> vaulting!

I'm not sure what you mean by "only leaves 3 available".  I would
imagine that with 6 drives you copy a maximum of 3 at a time to another
3 volumes.  That means you'll only have half the "bandwidth".

> After looking at the message boards it looks like others have had similar
> problems with vault speeds.  Is this still true?  Does it still take as long
> to vault an image as it took to back it up?  

Tape backups are often (in a tuned environment) limited by tape drive
performance.  If so, duplication time should be approximately equal to
backup time.  In a multiplex environment where you are duplicating a
portion of a mulitplex backup, it can be much worse.

You might want to consider in-line tape copy.  If you're going to take
the time to duplicate, you might want to duplicate on the front end.
However, since it takes more drives, it would probably increase your
total backup window (while hopefully decreasing the total time that the
drives are in use).

> I'm noticing this when I look at the 'All Log Entries' for vaulting.  These
> speeds look similar to the backup speeds:

> Is there any way to speed them up?  Is this fixed in ver 4.5 mp6 or 5.0 (I'm
> using 4.5 mp4 on AIX)?

Why would you expect a duplication to go faster than a backup?  I'm not
certain I understand what you want to fix.

-- 
Darren Dunham                                           ddunham AT taos DOT com
Senior Technical Consultant         TAOS            http://www.taos.com/
Got some Dr Pepper?                           San Francisco, CA bay area
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