chuckfee Posted May 23, 2003 Report Share Posted May 23, 2003 Hi there. I've been using Retrospect 6.5 for a couple months now (I was in the beta) and it is working great. however, as we continue to add servers to the backup rotation and ask Retrospect to multiple sets of media for local and offsite usage, the time to backup everything is becoming a real issue. We're partially through a network upgrade and want to know what we can do to maximize performance. Right now we are using a pentium3/800 mhz pc with 512 mb ram talking to network clients at 100mbit/s. We have a spare SMP system with 2x1ghz p3 cpu's that I can put in place of the current p3/800. However, if retrospect isn't SMP aware, this is unlikely to offer much of a speed boost. Will retrospect 6.5 make use of multiple processors? How much RAM should the backup server have? Our new network is gigabit ethernet and we'll be upgrading our servers from 100baseTX to 1000baseTX. We'll also put a gigabit card in our retrospect server. I'm hoping that will help speed up the network backups. What sort of numbers are you folks getting when backing up over a gigabit network? I know it's not going to be 10x the 100baseTX speed. All told, we're backing up about 15 servers, 10 Windows and 5 linux. We're also backing up exchange and MS SQL. Follownig advice in the manual and on these forums, I've disabled NTFS permissions storage and that has helped. We see about 300MB/min throughput over the network currently and a full backup is taking about 18 hours. Our backup device is an ADIC Scalar 100 LTO library. Right now it has one drive but we are trying to get another (it will hold up to six drives) The ADIC is an UltraSCSI 80 device and it's the only device on an adaptec 29160 Ultra 160 controller. Please let me know what is the best way to supercharge Retrospect 6.5? More RAM? More CPU? More Networking? all of the above? We're willing to shell out cash for a high-powered backup system but want to spend the money so we get the biggest bang for the buck. thanks. --chuck Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
markmaytum Posted May 23, 2003 Report Share Posted May 23, 2003 Hi Chuck, I've observed while trying to make our setup faster: We put a gig card in our Retrospect server somewhere in the 6.0 days. Backup throughput speed increased hardly at all. (backing up to two 4 cart AIT-1 autoloaders on a single 29160). So I suspect our bottleneck was/is our AIT drives. When we switched to 6.5, we bought a 2.4ghz P4 box with 1g of ram. Backup throughput didn't increase at all BUT, backup preparation goes a lot faster. Anything where Retrospect has to churn through a catalog to calculate what to backup or restore goes faster. Obviously the biggest increase in speed in having 6.5 backup to both autoloaders simultaneously. I'll bet when you score your new drive for your loader, that'll make a big difference! We're waiting for a 2 drive Qualstar AIT-3 loader to arrive. What I'm wondering is whether it'll be worth it to have each drive going to its OWN 29160. The docs say you can configure it that way or you can have both drives on the same SCSI bus (default setup). You must be able to set up your library so that each drive gets its own SCSI channel? Theorectically, a single 29160 should be able to handle two drives shovelling out a total of 10mb/s. HTH a little, -mark Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chuckfee Posted May 30, 2003 Author Report Share Posted May 30, 2003 Thanks for the info. Also, can anyone confirm or deny whether Retrospect is SMP aware? Will a 2nd processor do any good? --chuck Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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