NT Backups to DLT8000 takes over a day

[Ayman Altounji]

Since moving our main file server from an IBM 5000 with DDS4 tape drive to a ML370 with a DLT800 system our TN backups have gone form taking 5 hours to taking over 14 hours. Is this a known problem and if so, is there any driver updates we might require.

There is only a round 35GB of user data on the server and we an no longer perform full backups over night.

[Ayman Altounji]

NT 4.0 or 3.51? What backup software? Hardware or software compression?

[Ayman Altounji]

We are having a similar experience. We recently upgraded our Backup Server to an ML370. The ML370 came with the Compaq NC3163 Fast Ethernet NIC. We did not upgrade the DLTLibrary hardware and it is using an Adaptec SCSI controller rather than the internal controller supplied by Compaq. The DLT Library is an older Compaq DLT 15 using Compaq 2040 drives. We are running NT 4.0 SP6a and Veritas Backup Exec ver. 7.3. We used the Veritas drivers for the DLT drives and library.

Since upgrading to the ML370 we have experienced a little more than 50% reduction in data throughput of backups. We backup data from 30+ servers to this system. We ran Perfmon this weekend. There was no sign of abnormal Processor, memory, paging, or disk usage. We did notice long periods of the Network Interface peaking. We ran Perfmon only on the ML370. We did not run it on any of the other boxes.

Does anyone know of a performance or driver issue with the ML370 or the NIC rather than the DLT device? Any insights would be great.

[Ayman Altounji]

Hi Ron,

You wished to know what version of NT and what backup software we used.

We use NT4 SP6 and NT Backup. We are using DLT 4 tapes at maximum density and compression and are still only getting about 1GB/hour performance.

I posted posted a similar reply about two days ago and can only assume that it has been lost.

Regards

Barry