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Re: Poor Ultrium Performance with Veritas

 
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Eric A. Langenderfer
Occasional Contributor

Poor Ultrium Performance with Veritas

We just purchased an ultrium stand alone drive for our 5-bay tape array and
have Veritas Netbackup Datacenter Version 4.5 installed on a Windows 2000
Server and it is writing to our HP ULTRIUM LTO Tape Storage Array. We are
receiving very very poor read/write perfomance (2 to 4m/s). We are using the
Adaptec 39160/3960D-Ultra 160 SCSI adapters to connect to the tape drives.
The driver that we are using with the LTO tape drive is hplto.sys --> HP
Ultrium 1-SCSI SCSI Sequential Device version file version 1.0.1.7.
Please advise if there are any known problems/performance issues with this
combination. We need to have this resolved and I am currently working with
Veritas support as well.
Thanx
9 REPLIES 9
Zak_1
New Member

Re: Poor Ultrium Performance with Veritas

I have the exact same hardware but running Backup Exec Server 8.6 and I am having the same problem. I called Support and spent over an hour and it could not be resolved. I have tried every driver suggested w/ no success. Compaq support kind of gave me the finger and said it's not our problem.
Eugeny Brychkov
Honored Contributor
Solution

Re: Poor Ultrium Performance with Veritas

Hello all,
please look at HP recommended HBA list http://www.hp.com/cposupport/information_storage/support_doc/lpg50063.html . Looks like 39160 should be ok.
For LTO device to work well host should provide at least 7,5MB/s for LTO215 and 15MB/s for LTO230. I would recommend you to check SCSI bus - if you use correct cabling, if you have bus terminated from both ends with correct terminators. Install HP Library and Tape Tools from http://www.hp.com/cposupport/information_storage/support_doc/lpg50128.html and check the drive, generate support ticket for it. If you wish you may attach it to your next reply
Eugeny
Leif Halvarsson_2
Honored Contributor

Re: Poor Ultrium Performance with Veritas

Hi,
This is necessary not a drive performance problem, it can be a disk/filesystem performance problem as well.

What kind of data do you back up (average file size) ?

Is it possible to monitor disk and cpu load when backup is running ?

Eugeny Brychkov
Honored Contributor

Re: Poor Ultrium Performance with Veritas

I absolutely agree with Leif. You can measure perfomance of file system by Perfomance Assessment Tool (PAT) available from HP ( http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareDescription.jsp?locale=en_US&prodNum=C7401AтМй=English+%28US%29&basePartNum=co557&locBasepartNum=co557en&os=Microsoft+Windows+2000&tech=Software ). The rule is the larger file you have for backup the better perfomance you will get. So try backing up the largest file you have and look at perfomance.
Eugeny
Eric A. Langenderfer
Occasional Contributor

Re: Poor Ultrium Performance with Veritas

I have tried a couple of performance tools (pat was one of them). I am receiving around 11-13mbps via the pat program. I have tried performance write tools to write directly to the tape and not use veritas and I receive binary (0's and 1's) speeds of 33mbps and randam data (more true to real world) of 13mbps. The data that I am trying to backup is our file server. No dtabases, just files. Last night I upgraded the firmware on the LTO and still nothing. I have checked with Adaptec, and they have a service pack 4 out, but no instructions on how to install it. I will be loggin with them today to see if maybe I can find a problem with the adaptec. Any help on installing a downloaded adaptec service pack would be helpful.
Thanx for all the help
Michael Lampi
Trusted Contributor

Re: Poor Ultrium Performance with Veritas

You don't mention the kind of disks you are backing up, nor the typical file sizes being copied to tape, nor if the disks are on the same SCSI bus as the Tape Storage Array.

Small files will slow down backups, as will sharing the tape drive SCSI bus with the disk drives being backed up.

If your disk files are highly fragmented, then this will also slow down backups.
A journey of 1000 steps ends in a mile.
Eric A. Langenderfer
Occasional Contributor

Re: Poor Ultrium Performance with Veritas

Our file server contains a lot of small files (excel spreadsheets, word docs, etc.)
The file server is being backed up via our backup server, so the disk's are not on the same SCSI bus. Our master server is a DL-360 with 10k drives mirrored and our file server is a proliant 3000 with 10k drives RAID 5.
I am currently backing up our ghost server which has about 30GB on 25 files, so I will see how the performance works on much larger files. I will update when finished....
David Bell_1
Honored Contributor

Re: Poor Ultrium Performance with Veritas

Eric,

First, I could certainly be off base here. One of the first things I check with backup performance problems is that my ip network is correctly matched. By that I mean that My interfaces, switches, etc. are at 100MB Full Duplex or matched according to support. This is one of the biggest problems problems I have seen in all backup scenarios. It might behoove you to simply verify these.

HTH,

Dave
Chris Gregurek
Occasional Contributor

Re: Poor Ultrium Performance with Veritas

HAve you checked the scsi card to see what the data rate is set for? I've had some come in set to the minimum and gave me this problem.
It's not the destination but the journey that makes it interesting.