MSA1500i poor backup performance

[Niels Moesgaard]

Proliant DL360 G5 connected via a GB switch to the MSA1510i with msa20 shelf. If i do a test with HPltt with default setup for 3min. i se a read performance of about 1,5Mb/s!. If i use DP6.0 i can get about 5-6Mb/s. Backup of 5TB takes weeks..What can i expect?

Regards
Niels

[Allan D'Souza]

I presume your connection to the MSA1510i is at Gigabit speed. You can verify this both at the switch and on the MSA1510i. Data would come off the MSA20 as fast as the application could keep it going. This could be as fast as Gb line rate. So it appears the tape application is your bottleneck. To some extent you are already pointing that out with HPltt doing 1.5Mb and DP doing 5-6 Mb. Both of those number's seem too slow to me. I'm not a tape expert but you certainly have a mismatch between the drive and tape capabilities. Run a System Performance backup pre-test and restore pre-test to verify your drive read/write capability.

Other possibilities could be the processor is the bottleneck since you would be using both iSCSI and the Tape application at the same time. Are you using the multifunction NIC with iSCSI by any chance? The TCP offload capability of the embedded NICs should help out with the processor utilization but that's only if you use it.