On 5/3/05, Larsen, Errin M HMMA/IT <errinlarsen AT hmmausa DOT com> wrote:
> The tape drives are IBM Ultrium LTO drives, fiber attached to the
> NetBackup Master Server.  I have 8 of these in a Sun Branded L180.

Do you have only one server serving as a master and media server?
Those LTO drives (if they're gen 1) should be able to do 15MB/sec
uncompressed - On drives with a similar uncompressed rate, I get
50MB/sec compressed. If your media server doesn't have the bus
bandwidth to drive 8 of them, you're doing yourself a disservice by
running more drives.

Is your media server tuned properly for the environment? (search on
support.veritas.com for your OS and version in the tech docs to find
tuning information)

With 750GB, you should probably consider making the file server a
media server in some sort of SSO configuration.

Also -- when's the last time you defragmented that filesystem? 700GB
on a file server could be highly fragmented.

Consider an advanced client license and doing flashbackup. It does a
block level backup that allows you to restore individual files. It's
much faster than backing up files - unfortunately, your backup image
is the size of the allocated disk, not the used disk so if your
filesystem isn't almost full it's not quite worth it.

Or consider, maybe, synthetic full backups. That way it only reads the
changes from the server and builds a full image based on what's on
tape.
> 
> I have a hard time imagining that the slow down is in the client's SAN
> connection to the target drives, or the Master Server's SAN connection
> to the Tape Drives.
bottlenecks? If you have a SAN environment with multiple ISL'd
switches and all of the data at some point is passing through a single
link between switches, maybe that link is getting saturated.

-Charlie