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Speed of client backups over LAN


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I use Retrospect 7.7 Multi-server and am transitioning to a more virtualized server architecture.  Currently, about 6TB of files I keep backed up with Retrospect are on network iSCSI drives attached to the server with my LTO tape drive and local disk backup volumes.  Incremental backups are painless and Retrospect can backup at a rate of up to 4000 MB/min. 

 

I would like to move the iSCSI volume and the file server responsibility to a virtual server, but the virtual server won't have direct access to my tape drive and will have only network access to the disk backup volumes.  I have found that backups over the retrospect client top out at about 400 MB/min and I'm not sure what the bottleneck is.  All network connections are Gigabit, and CPU usage is low on both the Retrospect Server and the Retrospect Client.  How can I increase the speed of Retrospect Client backups?

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We get 400-500 MB/minute from the clients on 100Mb/s network.

 

Our virtualized servers are on gigabit network and is faster. It was a long time ago I did a full backup of a server, so I don't remember any figures.

 

So maybe some part of your network is 100Mb/s instead of gigabit?

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Lennart,

 

Good thought, but the servers involved are connected by full Gigabit connections to the same managed Gigabit switch.  I have even confirmed the connection speed in the switch's port status display.  Other network operations, such as FTP go much faster.  I can FTP between them at 3660 MB/min (488 Mbps).

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Lennart,

 

Good thought, but the servers involved are connected by full Gigabit connections to the same managed Gigabit switch.  I have even confirmed the connection speed in the switch's port status display.  Other network operations, such as FTP go much faster.  I can FTP between them at 3660 MB/min (488 Mbps).

 

We are using Retrospect since many years on multiple servers and we found out that the bottleneck is the hard drive subsystem in most cases. If Retrospect is running a backup to disk, we never saw a higher performance than round about less than 2 GB/m. This were systems with optimized IO performance (RAID 5 with 12 SAS hard disks on Windows). Linux clients seems to be a bit faster than Windows clients. Now we reached a 3TB limit what is possible to create a full backup to disk and a backup set transfer to tape with Retrospect over a weekend (Friday and Saturday) and we have no hope that we can use Retrospect beyond this size of data.

 

We tried using two GBit LAN interfaces running in a trunk but we couldn't increase the backup performance so I think that the network sub system isn't the bottleneck.

 

HTH Tom 

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