SDLT backup speeds

[Ayman Altounji]

I've just got a new SDLT running on a DL380 on Windows 2000 SP2 using Veritas 8.5. Everything is patched/upgraded to the latest versions and the drive is using the onboard SCSI card.

The drive is advertised as backing up at 11Mb/sec native but the best we've managed is 7.5 using compression, even off its local RAID5 disks. What is interesting is that the verification cycle doesn't go any faster either suggesting that it's not a network or disk speed issue.

Has anyone managed to get these drives to run at their advertised speed or seen this problem too? Any advice greatly appreciated.

[Ayman Altounji]

In case anyone else ever has this problem I seem to have fixed it by upgrading the Integrated Array from firmware 1.42 to 1.46. I'm now seeing speeds of 13-18 MA/s. Which is nice.

[Ayman Altounji]

I tried the firmware upgrade myself but had no real luck, what made a huge differnce was to install a 64mb 5300 controller... now am backing up at 13-16mb a second.

[Ayman Altounji]

Running 1,600MB/minute (yes, that's 1.6GB per minute) doing backups of SQL Server database dumps over a Gigabit Ethernet connection. Works out to about 26MB per second, so that's pretty good. Most of the problems I've come across with poor throughput have been due to antivirus software running on the server being backed up. McAfee Netshield is notorious for this, and I even have to stop the service and restart it after the backup.