Backup Speeds

[mitchell1981]

Hi all,

 

We use a NAS based backup, which consists of 6 1TB drives connected at 1gigabit.

 

I was wondering does anyone else use a similar system, and if so, what sort of speeds do you get from your backup? We are using ArcServe Backup 11.5, and the best speed I can get out of it is: 200 megabytes a minutes.

 

I might be doing something wrong with my maths but suggests that this could be a lot faster.

 

Is this normal, or has anyone got any ideas what might be slowing it down? There are two gigabit switches between the servers and the backup devices, but there is not much demand on these switches.

 

Thanks for any help you can give me.

[localzuk]

That is a good speed. 1gigabit per second is actually 125Mbytes per second.

[DMcCoy]

300 MB a minute is slow. What sort of NAS is it? I get 1GB a minute to an LTO2 drive (Backup Exec). Arcserve was always slow for me when I used it though. You could try creating a backup file with the built in windows backup on the nas and see if thats slow.

[localzuk]

Oh, I read that as 200Mbytes a *second*, per minute that is awful. What type of hard disks do your servers and your NAS box have in them? What sort of activity is there on both when the backup occurs?

[CyberNerd]

Are you getting any packet loss between the two machines, try pinging over a long period of time. Even a small amount of packet loss can result in rather large delays due to tcp windows slowing down if errors occur.

[mortstar]

I'm getting some horrific speeds using Windows 2003 NTBackup, around 120MB/Min. I've read up a couple of things and it seems that Server version of NTBackup spams the device for capacity data, really slowing down transfer speeds.

 

When not using NTBackup and just copying files over I get speeds of 250MB/min. The setup is this:-

 

Server -> 1Gb Copper -> Switch -> Fibre Run -> Switch -> 1Gb Copper -> NAS.

 

The NAS is a RAID 5 Linksys NSS6000.

 

When watching the network utilisation it peaks at 7% - looking like it's only using 100mbps link. There are no VLANs, both devices are on the same subnet. What's capping this speed?

[DMcCoy]

It's slower than it should be but I suspect it has an integrated chip with all the raid functions on it. It's not going to get more than 5-10MB/s I shouldn't think.

 

I get around 5-6MB/s with a 4 disk nas at home, although it would be a bit faster with a Gb link.

[greenfieldsupport]

is reading information faster, try copying something down and see what speed it gets

[Disease]

I get 398MB/pm to an Ultrium LTO3 Drive, DMcoy how do you get 1GB/pm, how is the LTO drive connected?

[mitchell1981]

We are using Lacie 1TB "Big Disks"

 

http://uk.insight.com/apps/productpresentation/index.php?product_id=LCE301156E

 

Our switches are all managed so I'm going to do some investigating to see if I can work out where the problem is.

 

Will try the packet loss ping test, and windows backup as well.

 

Thanks for suggestions.

[DMcCoy]

I get 398MB/pm to an Ultrium LTO3 Drive, DMcoy how do you get 1GB/pm, how is the LTO drive connected?

 

Thats the average speed when backing up my file server. With databases and system state along with verification its around 600MB/m (210GB in 6 hours).

 

Currently I have a physical server with U320 Dell PVT132t connected. This is connected to the main switch. The machines being backed up are all virtual machines on ESX, so this will reduce the speed a bit.

 

All the VMs and their data is stored on a EMC CX300 SAN.

 

Yesterdays backup exec

 

Original start time : 12 November 2007 23:00:00
Job started         : 13 November 2007 23:00:02
Job ended           : 14 November 2007 05:07:05
Elapsed time        : 06:07:03
Files               : 665,066
Directories         : 91,337
Skipped files       : 44
Corrupt files       : 0
Files in use        : 0
Byte count          : 215,246,785,096 bytes
Job rate            : 765.00 MB/Min (Byte count divided by Elapsed time for job)

 

I should think when ESX supports jumbo frames it will be slightly faster too.

[DMcCoy]

We are using Lacie 1TB "Big Disks"

 

http://uk.insight.com/apps/productpresentation/index.php?product_id=LCE301156E

 

Our switches are all managed so I'm going to do some investigating to see if I can work out where the problem is.

 

Will try the packet loss ping test, and windows backup as well.

 

Thanks for suggestions.

 

It has a 400Mhz processor and is a NAS, its not going to be very quick what ever you do. Does it have firewire or USB you can try?

 

The problem is small NAS aren't very powerful. I can write to an LTO2 tape at up to 2GB a minute I just can't pull data quick enough over the network!

[mitchell1981]

Ok, I'm coming to the conclusion from these helpful posts that the limitation is probably the software and processor in the NAS drive.

 

I'm going to try setting up a dedicated backup server and plug the drives in on a USB cable and see if that speeds things up.

 

At the moment my full backup is taking about 60 hours which isn't very practical!