Flip your Security Director off (aka carefully negotiate) a test period
where you disable virus scanning for a short window to try backing up
the data without your AV running.  We've done it here several times and
what you will most likely find is a small boost (on average 2-3MB/sec.)
The safe money IMO is on the fact that everyone's file server backups
tend to be slow because you've got a process crawling the data, which
takes forever.

To speed it up either:

1) Multi-stream backups / running multiple crawlers at the same time
2) Use flashbackup

Your exchange backups fly because you have a single contiguous block of
data (the database file) followed by (relatively speaking) large .log
files which are all in order.  If your file server was several large
database type files with only a few orderly and large log files you'd
probably get similar performance.

-Jonathan

PS: I <3 Security Directors

-----Original Message-----
From: veritas-bu-bounces AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
[mailto:veritas-bu-bounces AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu] On Behalf Of Jason
Slagle
Sent: Thursday, April 24, 2008 8:51 AM
To: veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
Subject: [Veritas-bu] Best Practice - Virus Scanning on windows FS's.


Hi guys,

I have a windows file server I am currently backing up that I am
expierencing very low throughput on.

The volume in question is a 3.3TB partition with about 2.6TB in use.

It's currently taking 66 hours to do a full of this file system to an
LTO
4 tape.

This is a network based backup.

I've been doing tuning, and the network path is clean (The exchange
server in the same rack on the same switch gets 8-9x the performance
when it gets backed up) - it's gig-e all the way and is unloaded.

One thing I was considering is that this may be an issue with the Virus
scanner.  Being a file server this contains a TON of files (9.8 million
files totaling 2.9TB), and I'm wondering if the virus scanner is causing
this.

The tuning guide suggests I should turn anti-virus off, but my security
director balked at this idea.

I was wondering what some of you with "way more data" than I have do.
Do you run virus scan on your fileservers?  Do you back them up in a
different way than I do?  I need single file recovery.

Any other tuning advice you can give?

Jason

--
Jason Slagle
/"\ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
.
\ /   ASCII Ribbon Campaign  .
  X  - NO HTML/RTF in e-mail  .
/ \ - NO Word docs in e-mail .

_______________________________________________
Veritas-bu maillist  -  Veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu

_______________________________________________
Veritas-bu maillist  -  Veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu