Enterprise Backup Solution - Help

[TechRoger]

I have a DAS VESSRAID BOX iscsi (RAID-5) that is directly connected to my file server.

 

Capacity 32 Terabytes directly connected to the file server using utp Giga bit ethernet

 

This acts as a shared drive for 8 departments and has a section for backups.

 

Problem is the backups take forever to complete as much as 3 days?????

 

I use Symantec back up to back up disk to disk on this vessraid box.

 

Current users are about 300 users who access departmental drives.

 

Please help me find a solution for my backups.

[jamesfed]

How much data is being backed up? - also when the backups are running are there any resource conentions? Most likely in your network connection to the iSCSI box.

[TechRoger]

I am backing up 1.5TB

 

Yes it is connected to a file server as DAS via a NIC and we perform disk to disk backup on there.

[PotNoodleTech]

3 days to back up 1.5TB? That is very slow.

 

What is the exact spec of your DAS VESSRAID BOX? RAM / Number of HDDs, type of HDDs etc.

 

Raid 5 is the thing that is jumping out at me. If your using multiple 7200SATA drives in Raid 5 on a low end raid card then write performance will be very poor.

 

If you are writing to a BOX alot (backing up to it) Raid 5 is far from the best choice.

[TechRoger]

the raid card is 2GB in size

 

FYI the following is also performed on this VESSRAID device.

 

It acts as expanded or direct attached storage for the file server and another partition is used for backups. You could have a point about RAID 5.

 

I am an intern at this firm and i just thought id research more about this problem so i could help the supervisor rectify the issue with his backups.

 

What would be the best thing to do in our case?

 

Thanks AButters and Jamesfed

[TechRoger]

16 bay SATA HDD, with 1GB utp cable connected to the server of which there are 3 not in use. its the vessraid promise 1000i series.

 

Kind regards

[morganw]

So this iSCSI box provides storage for your fileserver as well as a backup for your fileserver? And the backup software is disk-to-disk? Surely it's using iSCSI that is the bottleneck here, it's not fast anyway but this will be reading files and writing the backups over the same network interface at the same time. iSCSI doesn't give you Direct Attached Storage it gives Network Attached Storage, are you sure it isn't using an external SAS connection to the fileserver? It would also be a really bad idea to be make your only backups back onto the same device or onto something in the same room. Is this your only backup system?

[morganw]

16 bay SATA HDD, with 1GB utp cable connected to the server of which there are 3 not in use. its the vessraid promise 1000i series.

 

If you are using a direct iSCSI connection to the server, you should be able to configure your backup drive to use a second cabled connection using one of the spare ports. So you would read one one cable and write on the other one.