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Ben HartFlag for United States of America

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iSCSI DAS/Backup Exec performance question

Recieved my new DroboPro yesterday, ran a test backup to disk job last night using a copy of the normal Differential tape job.  Normal job takes on average 6 hours..this test took 8.5 backing up a hair over 500gigs.

Server is an HP Proliant DL360 G5, 3.25ghz Xeon, 3.5gb ram, pcie 1gig dediacted nic for iSCSI.  Wired directly to the DroboPro whose also got a 1gb interface.


Having never setup or configured iSCSI before I let the install disk do that for me.

Anyway, Are there any "best practices" or performance related things I can do either in Backup Exec (ver 12) or within Server 2003 itself?

Since this test job and the previous nights jobs both backed up  583gb and 596gb respectively, I would have assumed that sata-300 disks would write faster than an LTO4 tape drive...

Any advice?
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@tygrus: I just read where the limit for Gigabit Ethernet was 125mbps.. nut Im unsure if that was theoretical or what.  You mentioning hte weakest link got me to thinking though and I chose poorly with regards to the hard drives themselves.  The Western Digitals I chose have a max rate of 100mbps from the buffer to disk.  I should have put more time into that decision becaue Hitachi Deskstars for just a little more in price have a max of 202mbps (buffer to disk).

@ggipson: No I do not use teh verify option specifically because it doubles teh amount of time teh job runs.  And I tossed around the idea of using the Drobo drives in a Raid0 format however since one of the goals was to stop daily jobs to tapes altogether and only push to tape for the weekly jobs I can't afford to lose the data protection raid5 offers.
How different were your jobs switching from Raid5 to 0?



Also I'm going through and updating the nic, disk/array controller drivers and firmware since I realized teh backup server was using scsi array controller drivers from 2006.  Anyway I found that Microsoft's iSCSI Initiator 2.08 is dated 2008.. I've googled a bit and it doesnt appear they've updated it at all.  Should I continue to use it or is there a better alternative?
I think this document may answer your queries.
http://support.veritas.com/docs/231488
I am evaluating that article right now.
OK I can't do anything about the number or types of files, the block size, compression (since the disc destination doesnt support it), and SCSI is irrelevant here.  But I am going to bump the amount of RAM on the backup server, try hard setting the page file size, and I've already swapped out the nic with w TOE enabled one.  Didn't see much difference there.
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Nice comparisons on the two links you provided, however I'm not concerned about the lack of read performance as nothing reads from it except during a restore and even then.. I'm not in that big of a hurry.

I will try the netspeed though and report back.