> In my last meeting with our EMC crew we was lead to believe that given the 
> size and number of files that the backups would be this slow
> normally, doesn't seem right to me, but they are the experts, right. EMC
> did run some health checks on the backup end but I will ask about the
> 480.  As far as the crashing part that is a comment from my team who has been 
> here for years(I'm the new guy) I havent verified that.
> 
> Everything is going Fiber from NS480 to tape drives. I am in the process
> of re organizing the groups so that the home folders get 3 hours of
> pretty much deticated use of the library, have a couple of small jobs
> run concurrently but they normally take about 15mins. I have 7 drives
> all fiber attached LTO3.
> 
> I am thinking about getting away from the NDMP for this folder so that I
> can use wildcards and use 26 saveset, that is what I did my other
> networker domain. \home\a* ....
> 
> I would love to split the folders up but we now have 3 silos of Admins -
> design, operations and backup. Me being in the backup group fall on deaf
> ears when trying to get the other two to understand that even though it
> makes the helpdesk life easier to use 1 folder, it makes backing it up a
> real nightmare.



NetWorker's bigasm test process can tell you the raw write speed of your 
drives.  However, writing 17MB/sec is the type of speed that i would see when 
doing traditional backups across the LAN.  If you start backing up by using  
\home\a* ...., then you still have performance issues seen with on LAN backups, 
so you may not get any farther than what you have now.  Still.. you can test 
that now to see if there is a difference.

However... watch out on the wildcard usage... I know it works, but not sure if 
EMC ever officially supported using it.

If there are no issues with the drive itself and bigasm can prove it can write 
faster than the 17MB/sec., then my question is what is causing the backups to 
go so slow?

Essentially the backup command is responsible to create the backup stream to 
the drives (tar, dump, vbb?).  Which one do you use?  Maybe one is better than 
the other.  I think the difference between tar and dump is the way it traverses 
the file system.  One goes up and down the tree, and the other does it level by 
level.

I can see  if there were many files to process, then this could slow down the 
backups.

Good luck...

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