> Agreed on the shoeshine thing.  But mux'd backups do hurt large restore
> performance.  
> 
> Four servers equally mux'd together would increase your restore time by four
> since three out of every four 
> fragments would have to be ignored.  I discovered this when I was making
> offsite duplicates from mux'd backups.  I had these huge duplication times
> until I demux'd my originals.

Actually it's not this simple.  The faster and fatter the client, the
more it's true.

If your client is slower than the tape, then it might not make any
difference at all.  If my client can only take 100Mb/s (~ 12MB/s) and my
tape can do 48MB/s compressed, then ignoring 3 of every 4 fragments
doesn't cost me any time on the restore.  I'm still waiting on the
network for the restore (and more likely waiting on file creation on the
client).

-- 
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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