Slow Backup throughput

Hello Everyone.

We have a W2K3 enviroment on a gigabit lan. I have a hp tape backup device
connected to our file server. every night we back up our sql server, excahnge
server and file server. We are using Veritas (now Symantec).

Our back ups take forever, it takes about two days to backup 130gb. It used
to take only 4-5 hours, and this was doing a full backup of 130gb.

I contacted Veritas, they suggested that the slow throughput may be due to
network problems. Both the veritas tech and I went through to check all the
settings that we could think of, but were not able to find a smoking gun.

I did a small ( 2gb) local backup to a folder on the fileserver.It took 10
minutes to backup 2 gb! Just copying and pasting a 1gb folder on the local
fileserver takes 5 minutes.

Does anyone have a suggestion as to what I may be doing wrong?

Thanks

"Damon Johnson" wrote:
> Hello Everyone.
>
> We have a W2K3 enviroment on a gigabit lan. I have a hp tape backup device
> connected to our file server. every night we back up our sql server, excahnge
> server and file server. We are using Veritas (now Symantec).
>
> Our back ups take forever, it takes about two days to backup 130gb. It used
> to take only 4-5 hours, and this was doing a full backup of 130gb.
>
> I contacted Veritas, they suggested that the slow throughput may be due to
> network problems. Both the veritas tech and I went through to check all the
> settings that we could think of, but were not able to find a smoking gun.
>
> I did a small ( 2gb) local backup to a folder on the fileserver.It took 10
> minutes to backup 2 gb! Just copying and pasting a 1gb folder on the local
> fileserver takes 5 minutes.
>
> Does anyone have a suggestion as to what I may be doing wrong?
>
> Thanks

I can think about 3 things.

1) Is there any server that could be old/slow/overloaded? In the job log you
should be able to read the start and end time for the backup of each server:
in this way you can discover if there is one server in particular that is
more slow than it should be.

2) Have you recently activated job verification? It can take long times,
even more when it runs during working hours.

3) Is the HP backup device an autoloader? If so and if you have set
retension times for the tapes, you could have problems if the retension time
is not over when the job needs another tape to continue. In this case for
example the job could run on the first tape until it needs a second one; the
second tape is append/overwrite protected for some hours, so the job keeps
waiting for the tape to be overwritable/appendable; when the tape is
available, the job finishes the backup. If this is the case and you haven't
set a job timeout, the job can last a lot of hours more than usual.

Anyway try looking for alerts in the Alerts tab and single server job
duration in the job log.

Hope it helps.

Regards,

Carlo

Thanks Carlo. I'll look into these.

"Carlo Cacciafesta" wrote:

> "Damon Johnson" wrote:
> > Hello Everyone.
> >
> > We have a W2K3 enviroment on a gigabit lan. I have a hp tape backup device
> > connected to our file server. every night we back up our sql server, excahnge
> > server and file server. We are using Veritas (now Symantec).
> >
> > Our back ups take forever, it takes about two days to backup 130gb. It used
> > to take only 4-5 hours, and this was doing a full backup of 130gb.
> >
> > I contacted Veritas, they suggested that the slow throughput may be due to
> > network problems. Both the veritas tech and I went through to check all the
> > settings that we could think of, but were not able to find a smoking gun.
> >
> > I did a small ( 2gb) local backup to a folder on the fileserver.It took 10
> > minutes to backup 2 gb! Just copying and pasting a 1gb folder on the local
> > fileserver takes 5 minutes.
> >
> > Does anyone have a suggestion as to what I may be doing wrong?
> >
> > Thanks
>
> I can think about 3 things.
>
> 1) Is there any server that could be old/slow/overloaded? In the job log you
> should be able to read the start and end time for the backup of each server:
> in this way you can discover if there is one server in particular that is
> more slow than it should be.
>
> 2) Have you recently activated job verification? It can take long times,
> even more when it runs during working hours.
>
> 3) Is the HP backup device an autoloader? If so and if you have set
> retension times for the tapes, you could have problems if the retension time
> is not over when the job needs another tape to continue. In this case for
> example the job could run on the first tape until it needs a second one; the
> second tape is append/overwrite protected for some hours, so the job keeps
> waiting for the tape to be overwritable/appendable; when the tape is
> available, the job finishes the backup. If this is the case and you haven't
> set a job timeout, the job can last a lot of hours more than usual.
>
> Anyway try looking for alerts in the Alerts tab and single server job
> duration in the job log.
>
> Hope it helps.
>
> Regards,
>
> Carlo

Check that your network bandwith is OK, by copying some big files.
If this is OK, check if your antivirus have outbound scanning enabled
,this is a common problem when poor backup performance.
It's normal to have only inbound scanning enabled on servers.

Jordan

On Thu, 18 May 2006 11:26:02 -0700, Damon Johnson
<(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:

>Hello Everyone.
>
>We have a W2K3 enviroment on a gigabit lan. I have a hp tape backup device
>connected to our file server. every night we back up our sql server, excahnge
>server and file server. We are using Veritas (now Symantec).
>
>Our back ups take forever, it takes about two days to backup 130gb. It used
>to take only 4-5 hours, and this was doing a full backup of 130gb.
>
> I contacted Veritas, they suggested that the slow throughput may be due to
>network problems. Both the veritas tech and I went through to check all the
>settings that we could think of, but were not able to find a smoking gun.
>
>I did a small ( 2gb) local backup to a folder on the fileserver.It took 10
>minutes to backup 2 gb! Just copying and pasting a 1gb folder on the local
>fileserver takes 5 minutes.
>
>Does anyone have a suggestion as to what I may be doing wrong?
>
>Thanks