While much of the discussion in this forum has focused on backup performance
issues, another issue that is perhaps even more important is restore
performance.  In particular, as servers have become more powerful, have
become consolidated, and larger amounts of disk media are attached, the
implications of a media failure become more serious.  For example, depending
on the average file size, the cpu speed of the client, and the network
connectivity, the time to restore a larger(e.g. 24 GB) RAID storage device
could  be several hours or even more than one day.  If you have never gone
through the exercise, I would encourage you to restore the contents of a
entire raid storage unit to a test server.  You may be surprised how long
this can take, especially if there are lots of small files.

I'd be interested in hearing from on others on the methods others have used
to mitigate the risk of an extended outage due to long restore times that
could be encountered if an entire raid storage unit failed.

For example, limit the amount of storage that can be attached to a single
server?

Create prioritized plans to restore "important" data first?

Limit use of ADSM to clients below a certain size?

Thanks in advance,

Taylor