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Re: after upgrade same speed

 
badsector
Advisor

after upgrade same speed

Hi,

We upgraded a MSL6000 from 2 ultrium 2 (fc drives) drives to 2 ultirum 4 1840 fc drives and we have same speed/time for backups?

We also upgraded the fc router on the library with the e200-300 4gb fc one.

Is there some additional settings that need to be done?

Also when we ran the hp lto tools to upgrade firmware it showed that library already had the newest firmware?

thanks
10 REPLIES 10
TTr
Honored Contributor

Re: after upgrade same speed

> and we have same speed/time for backups

Performance problems with backups almost never have to do with the tape drives. The problem is usually with collecting the backup data from around the backup clients in order to write it to the tape drives.
So what does your backup traffic flows look like? You need to check from where the backup data originates, (reading the disks on a slow backup client), how does it get to the media server (LAN traffic) before it can be written to the tapes.

Also the LTO4 drives need a lot of data to be sent to them in order to be efficient. Very rarely you have enough data to keep an LTO4 drive busy. Most likely LTO3 drives would have been more appropriate.

You need to provide more details about your backup environment.
Torsten.
Acclaimed Contributor

Re: after upgrade same speed

You can use LTT's SysPerf option to check how fast the server can deliver the data.

Hope this helps!
Regards
Torsten.

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Rob Leadbeater
Honored Contributor

Re: after upgrade same speed

Hi,

Which version of the MSL6000 do you have ?

I'm guessing the "hot plug" version which is limited to the speed that the drives can run out.

See this advisory:
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?objectID=c00598538тМй=en&cc=us&taskId=101&prodSeriesId=316040&prodTypeId=12169

Note the bottom line:

"There is no workaround for the speed limiting. Therefore, it is recommended to only upgrade the hot-plug MSL5000 and MSL6000 libraries with newer drives if capacity (not performance) is the main driver for the upgrade."

Cheers,

Rob
badsector
Advisor

Re: after upgrade same speed

Well this is the MSL 6030 library now with 1 e1200-300 fc router and 2 ult-4 tape drives.

This will turn out to be a waste of time and money if we cannot get these speeds up. I don't understand why in the specifications than it says that ult-2 drives can do 345.6 GB/hr (2 drives) and ult-4 drives can do 1.152 TB/hr (2 drives). What do these specifications mean than?

Thank you for your answers.
Torsten.
Acclaimed Contributor

Re: after upgrade same speed

Hmmm, compare the product no. of your library with the numbers listed in the advisory.

Hope this helps!
Regards
Torsten.

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badsector
Advisor

Re: after upgrade same speed

Even if it turns to be the this type of library (not at work right now - not sure which part number library is) what are the top speeds I could be looking it via this configuration?
badsector
Advisor

Re: after upgrade same speed

How can I measure this information where the slow down is? Is there some type of tool that will put all this in a report?
Pieter 't Hart
Honored Contributor

Re: after upgrade same speed

On a single server you'll probably never get anough data from your filesystem to get full speed.

To use the full potential speed of these tape drives, you need some backup software that's organized with a
"backup server" that control's backup processing
"media server/agent" on a server with LTO drives
"backup agents" on servers that need to be backed up.

the backup-server instructs multiple (!) backup agents to send data to a media server.
This data throughput is accumulated at the media server until anough is reached to utilize the full speed of the LTO drive.
Only with enough servers (and agents) to keep the data sream flowing at the right throughput the LTO drive can perform at maximum speed.
It's possible that near the end when (several) agents have run out of data to backup, speed will decrease again.

Even with local SAN volumes there needs to be an agent to accumulate data from several volumes instead of processing volume-by volume.

Torsten.
Acclaimed Contributor

Re: after upgrade same speed

But you can also test with LTT and "simulated" data.

Hope this helps!
Regards
Torsten.

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those who understand binary, and those who don't.

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