HP Surestore 2/20 With an Ultrium 1 Drive and Netbackup 3.4.1

[David_198]

I have 2 of the above tape libraries and I am using Netbackup 3.4.1 on Windows 2000. I can't seem to get the 15 m/sec speed that the drive is supposed to be capable of. I am SCSI attached with a 39160 card from Adaptec.Each drive has it's own SCSI card. Veritas's tech's suspect the SCSI cards, but I don't think that is the issue. Does anyone else have this same problem? The maximum speed I get on the drives is about 5-7 m/sec.

[Duncan Edmonstone]

Check the firmware revs on the ultrium drives... early ultrium firmware versions suffered from performance issues.

HTH

Duncan

[David_198]

I have the newest Firmware that HP has available. I have checked about every week just to be sure that there was no postings that were directly linked to my specific circumstances. I wish there was an easy solution on this one. I have been working on it since December with Veritas support.

[Eric de Lange_2]

Hi David,

May I suggest the following ?

- Run the Performance assessment tool on your windows 2000 host which will test you filesystem capabillities and returns a MB/sec value for the maximum that your system is capable of delivering. The Performance Asessment Tool is available here: ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/information_storage/software/pat12.exe

- Go into the BIOS (ctrl-A) setup for the 39160 SCSI HBA's and set the transfer rates for the Ultrium tape devices to a fixed 80 MB/sec.

I have seen instances where the SCSI HBA negotiated the speed between HBA and tape device all the way down to 0MB/sec leading to terribly slow backups.

Hope this helps,

-Eric

[David_198]

I have tried the Performance Assesment test and got about 7Mg/sec on the system. The I tried it on about a dozen other servers and the output was exactly the same on all of my servers, so I tried it on a few low end workstations and got the same output. 7Mg/sec. I'm not sure if this tool is absolute for performance, because there was a huge variation between the processors, memory, and Drive configurations on the test subjects. The only thing that was the same is that all of the test subjects were Dells.

[Robert Bean]

Not knowing what Dell you have or scsi controller you have it attached to makes it a bit difficult to asess the problem more accurately. We do know that we have performance issues with some Dell computers & our stand alone units as well as the autoloader, so I would recommend that you go to that site to see if you have one of the models that does not support Ultrium technology. The compatabilty URL for you is:

http://www.hp.com/products1/storage/compatibility/hardware/ultrium-dell/index.html

[Leif Halvarsson_2]

Hi
I have done some performance tests with LTO drives on W2000/NT and HP-UX. In general it was hard to reach the same performance with W2000/NT as with HP-UX. With HP-UX I could easy reach 30 MB/s (compressed) and with NT/W2000 about 15-20MB/s. The servers, data and disk system was about equal.

Some ideas.
- What type of data (small files, big files,databases etc). It is hard to reach good performance with small files).

- Check the CPU load during backup. High load can indicate a server bottleneck, low load there is probably a file system bottleneck (disk performance, fragmentation, great number of small files etc.).