We use a converter box to connect our SE DLT tape library to the differential SCSI port on the NetApp. I have had no trouble whatsoever with the converter, and we get anywhere from 4-7Mb/sec in backup speed with budtool NDMP, depending on the size of the qtree being backed up. If you backup your entire 100GB volume in one shot, it should complete in about 5 hours with a local-attached tape drive. Well worth the cost of a converter, I think.
Moshe
"Rainchik, Aleksandr (MED, Non GE)" wrote:
Hello,
We have F720 NetApp that holds about 100Gb of data and we are backing it up trough the network, not with directly connected tape. Why? F720 comes with differential port for tape connection and our nice tape library is all single-ended.
We are using Budtool to do that and it's all done via NDMP.
And what we have is 1024 K/sec backup speed. So it takes about a 24 hours to finish Level 0 on filer. There is a Sun E450 on the same subnet, plugged to the same switch, both at 100 full-duplex, going to the same media server. And backups are 3 times faster there.
Is there something I can tweak on filer? Like change priority of ndmpd process, something to speed up backups?
Can you let me know what is your backup speed in NetApp/Budtool configuration?
Thank you.
P.S. We are thinking about getting differential to single-ended SCSI converters. Any experience with such converters?