LTO5 Tape Drives

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networkn

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#90526 23-Sep-2011 11:57

Hi There!

Anyone using these and Symantec Backup Exec 2010? I would be interested in the rough specs of your server and the average data rates you are getting please?

ptinson

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#525077 23-Sep-2011 15:40

I am setting up TSM and LTO5 at the moment.
Once its running i can post some details if its of interest...

Paul

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networkn

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#525082 23-Sep-2011 15:48

Yes please.

I backed up the c: of this ML350G6, and got 2.1GB a minute! If I B2D this to another Partition, and then backup the parition I get 8GB a minute! The B2D itself ran at 3GB/m

ptinson

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#525090 23-Sep-2011 16:03

What drive interface do you have and is this in a single manual load drive or a robot?

I am using a TS3200 with 2 8gb FC drives so it will be interesting to see what we get.

meat popsicle

networkn

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#525091 23-Sep-2011 16:04

Single Manual drive, SAS Interface. P212 Controller.

ptinson

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#525185 23-Sep-2011 20:58

I expect to get some stats early Monday so will post an update then.
Realistically i would expect a similar data rate as what you are getting per drive.

Ill also dig out our spec and post what i can.

meat popsicle

buzzy

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#525568 25-Sep-2011 16:31

So the ML350 is the backup server? I.e. We can take the LAN out if the equation, because it's backing up a local disk?

He backup of C: will typically be slower than raw wire speed of the tape or disk. This is because there are lots of files, and it takes time to read the file system and get the info about each file. Also, assuming this is a Win2k8 server, the C: drive is backed up using a VSS snapshot. There are considerably more items that need to be quiesced on 2k8 than W2k3 ( something like 200 compared to 12).

By comparison, if you back up a non-system partition which holds a B2D folder, it doesn't have any OS files to take a VSS snap of, and there's probably few files on the partition - say a couple of hundred as opposed to 30,000. This means considerably less file system lookups. It may be worth duplicating the B2D job and seeing what rate that gets - because BE will then have to process each file in the backup-to-disk job, so you will see the slower rate.

In short, hitting wire speed with LTO5 is non-trivial.
HTH

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ptinson

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#529425 5-Oct-2011 10:38

Right, so finally getting to the testing part...
The first, basic tests I have done are with 64k & 1024k block sizes:
* 64k - for each drive we are getting around 350MB/sec write
* 1024k - for each drive we get around 470MB/sec write

The spec is:
server - x3650 M3 with 16 GB Mem and a single CPU at this point, 2 dual port 8 GB FC card
Drives - TS3200 with two 8GB FC drives one FC port each

When i get some further tests done i will share more.

meat popsicle