different backup rates between two servers

[Jonathan Barnes]

I have a MSL 2024 backing up three system. One is the system that it is connected on a SAS and one two others over the network channel. The local backup runs at 130mb. I have one that is backing up at 2100mb a minute. I have just added another remote system that is quite a bit slower at close to 700mb per minute. They are all in the same rack and connected to the same blade and using the same subnet and settings. I am using backup exec 11d. I have gone through all the settings on the backup job and they all appear to be the same. I can not see why there would be such a difference in the backup job transfer rate.

[thomasr]

There are several possibilities.

- The slow server has a highly-fragmented disk, slowing file access
- The slow server has a higher proportion of small or tiny files, which will make backups much slower
- The slow server is RAM, processor, NIC, or more likely disk I/O constrained -- contention for resources will slow the backup

Are these three separate jobs? Are they running concurrently, or in series? Is there perhaps a 'priority' setting in BE? Are there one or two drives in the library? Exactly which model of tape drive?

Also, note that 'b' is used to refer to bits, 'B' to bytes; there are eight bits in a byte... I hope your performance is MB/min, not Mb/min. It's not clear whether your performance for the direct-connect job is MB/sec or MB/min.