I use an HP LTO-3 tape drive to make backups and restores of my data. It is hooked up to a server running SLES9 and I use Bakbone for backup.

Backing up from Server0 to Server1 across the network with the LTO attached runs at about 60MB/s writing speed, however reading from LTO to disk for restore operations is only about 20MB/s.

What can be done to optimize this? Larger buffer sizes? I tried iozone but don't know how to run it in order to test the remote drives. Any suggestions?

On each of the servers I am running 3 Gigabit Ethernet ports bonded in parallel.

Thanks,

You need to run more checks before assuming its writing at 20MB a second.. Where are you getting this information, from Bakbone software? I'm more familiar with Netbackup Enterprise but in my experience, don't always go by what the backup software tells you its writing at. Also in my experience, its always faster on backup than restore, depending on how you have it backed up, hard drives involved, etc.

You have to imagine, it's also less strain on drives when its reading from the drive rather than writing and restoring to the drive itself. What type of drives are we dealing with here? Is there other loads on these drives? In most scenarios, the faster the backup, the slower the restore. If your in a shop where you depend heavily on a lot of restores, you may want to evaluate how you perform your backups. I've always worked in shops where there were very few restores as the backups were mainly for disaster recovery backups as there were few errors and limitations to users making mistakes in deleting their own data or data on the servers, etc.

I can see the time it takes to backup/restore a job. I am doing digital post production of feature films and each part is about 400 GB, usually 5 or 6 parts per film and maybe two or three versions of each in different stages of completion.

Since each frame (= 1 file) is about 20MB each, I can see the count of files restored and have a pretty good idea of the transfer speed.

My disks are SATA RAID5 with 2TB per server. Each server has triple Gigabit ethernet cards in bonding setup. My second server is running SLES9 slower than SLES8 but this should improve with the upcoming SP2.

Some of my backups run at 5MB/s others at 60+. I want to know why (besides the IP bonding).

Thanks
Dirk

You have to consider tape seek, rewind time and so on.. It's the same in Netbackup, it will jump from 2MB/s to 50MB/s and so on.. Restores are always slower than the actual backups.

To find your bottleneck though, you'd have to perform individual tests. Test by doing it on this host and possibly on another test host with and without the bonding, etc. And again, never judge your speed by the backup software as most can use cache compared to what is actually being written to disk, etc.