StoreEver Tape Storage
1748274 Members
4280 Online
108761 Solutions
New Discussion юеВ

Can I reduce the performance on a Ultrium 448

 
Gerald Roy
New Member

Can I reduce the performance on a Ultrium 448

Hi,

I need to run an archive backup over the network once a month during office hours using an Ultrium 448. I am worried that this will impact performance of the remote server (especially HDD) and would like to reduce the speed at which the tape drive runs the backup (from 30MB/s to 15MB/s). Is that possible?

Thanks
Gerald
3 REPLIES 3
Curtis Ballard
Honored Contributor

Re: Can I reduce the performance on a Ultrium 448

The drive doesn't have any commands to force it to run at reduced speeds.

If you are running the backup over the network you may have a built in limit. What is your network bandwidth between the server with the data and the backup server? A 100Mb network will peak at about 7MB/s.
Gerald Roy
New Member

Re: Can I reduce the performance on a Ultrium 448

It's a 1GB LAN. If I can't slow down the backup drive it looks like I'll have to throttle the network (which I wanted to avoid because it slows it down for every other apps running).

Thanks
Curtis Ballard
Honored Contributor

Re: Can I reduce the performance on a Ultrium 448

A 1Gb LAN connection probably will load your server during backup in multiple ways. The processor load to drive the network protocol stack will be significant as well as the I/O activity.

You may be able to have some effect on the impact if you have any way to control the priority of the backup process. If you can give the backup process a low priority then it will have less performance impact on the server. There may be multiple processes that would have to be given low priority.

If you have a managed switch in your LAN you may be able to set bandwidth limits on just the backup traffic which would force the backup to run slowly.

Interesting problem - we spend most of our time trying to explain why people can't get their drive to run at the expected speed rather than trying to inject some delays.

It would be worth running a performance test with L&TT to see what the actual performance could be. There may already be a bottleneck somewhere.