BackupExec 12.5 - high cpu usage on remote agent but very little data

For a long time now our backups to tape using BackupExec 12.5 have been very slow (as low as 110MB/min) and I have only just gotten round to looking at sorting this.

The situation is one 2008 server connected to a LTO4 Tandburg tape drive backing up other servers using the Symentec remote agent.

One thing that I did spot is that the servers on which the remote agent is install are using the power of an entire processing core running the remote agent even though very little data is going over the NIC - in fact the NICs usage during the backup can regularly be seen at 0%.

Any clues? :)

@jamesfed:

I would be tempted to uninstall the BE agent on the server and re-install with the latest after updating the BE server via liveupdate from the tools in the console.

It does seem to me to be an agent issue although the Tanberg unit has been frought with bugs (Check for the latest drivers on this also) :)

Good luck :)

Just updated everything that I coud on both the agent and media server but appears to be no change.
I did notice that the media server backing up its self is plenty fast enough however anything over the network goes at a snails pace.

One thing I didn't mention - all our servers with the agent on are running inside Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V Virtual Machines.

Just playing around with Jumbo Frames and offload but it dosn't seem to be doing anything...

Backing up to local disk appears to work fine - 500MB/min + so it must be something to do with the tape drive.

To bad its a SCSI would love it to be SAS! :P

What compressions settings do you have enabled for the job?
That can drastically reduce speed but it depends.