Toasters, What is the general consensus for NDMP backup speeds? I have four older F760Cs that are getting about 5-6 MB/s to local tape drives. The problem is that I also have another nine filers (1 F630, 1 F720, 1 F740, 6 F760C) that are backing up via 3-way NDMP and we are lucky to see 4-5 MB/s; most are in the 1-2 MB/s range. And don't even get me started on the Solaris/SunOS/Linux/HP-UX/DEC clients that backup through the drives attached to the filers (0.1 - 2 MB/s).
We were looking at upgrading the tape drives and such, but we have done a few test dumps from filer to filer, filer to LTO-2, and filer to LTO-2 attached to a Sun, and the numbers didn't improve much (definitely not enough to justify buying a new tape library / tape technology).
Just a little background: We are using DLT7000 tape drives, which should have a maximum through put of about 10 MB/s (2:1 compression), contained in a Quantum P3000 library. We have all our filers on two separate networks; one for general data sharing and a private one for our backups. The private network is all GbE (fibre) using the Alteon GbE cards (Gigabit Ethernet Controller II).
We are doing qtree dumps, and while some of the filers have only four qtrees per volume, others have over 40. Each qtree is generally capped at 200 GB max, and for those filers that have lots of qtrees, we still try to limit each saveset to around 200 GB.
So, I guess what I'm really asking is 1) "What kind of speeds are you seeing?" and 2) "Am I doing something wrong?"
Many thanks,
Geoff Hardin geoff.hardin@dalsemi.com Difficulty is the excuse history never accepts.