Netserver and streaming Ultrium Library 2/20?

[Robert Demmer_1]

Hi,
is it possible to achieve a data thoughput of about 40-60MB/s in a HP Netserver to bring a directly attached 2/20 Ultrium Library into streaming mode? Any experience?
The server should be Intelbased 2CPUs (1Ghz), 512mb Ram
1M-(U3) Netraidcontroller with 3x18gb (U3-10k) Raid5
2 separate U3-SCSI-PCI Controller(64bit/33mhz) for the Ultrium drives.

This should be a dedicated backup server connected with Gigabit NIC to a Cisco Catalyst3500.
Where could be my bottleneck provided that enough data will be received from network?

Robert
Robert

[Jan Klier]

HP provides a performance assesment tool (available at http://www.hp.com/cposupport/information_storage/software/pat12.exe.html) which can be used to verify that your server can provide data at sufficient speed to stream an LTO drive.

This does not test the throughput to the drive, but rather the ability to pull data from your disk.

If the LTO drives are either connected via separate direct attached SCSI busses or via one dedicated fibre channel link there should not be any bottleneck in the library connection.

[Robert Demmer_1]

Thanks for reply
I know pat.exe and I have done several tests with it but the really interesting thing I??ve found out recently is the fact that the backup software(omniBack) does not need a high performance disksystem on a dedicated backup server with 2xLTOs attached (for test purpose I used "nul" devices). That was new to me that there was almost no hdd activity when backing up 3 clients concurrently to a LC2000 (with 3 NICs, different networks). If you can get enough data from network the performance depends only on your RAM and CPU. During Backup the 2x933Mhz CPUs were at about 95%. I did not expect that a total of 300Mbit (in fact about 20-22mb/s) can stress the CPUs at this high level.

Robert