Hello and welcome to part one of a short series of posts about tuning backups.
I want to show you the performance, Backup Exec can reach.
Disclaimer:
Of course, this is neither an agreement that these performance values can be reached in every environment on the globe, nor that faster environments are not possible. It’s just a glimpse into what we do in our day-to-day business.
The Setup
During this series of posts we used Backup Exec on the PingUs Backup Appliance:
The technical specifications of the machine are
- HPE DL380 Gen. 9
- 1x Intel Xeon E5-2640 v3 (8 Cores, 2.6 GHz)
- 64 GB RAM
- 1x 2-Port 10GBE network card
- 1x 2-Port SAS HBA (for SAN connect)
- 1x SmartArray 440ar (2 GB FBWC)
- 2x 240 GB SATA SSD (for OS)
- 24x 1 TB SAS HDD (7.2krpm, nearline) (for backup storage)
The server is connected to a HPE MSA 2040 SAS SAN that is primarily used for a VMware vSphere 6 environment with two hosts.
The server was set up with WIndows Server 2012 R2 and Backup Exec 15, including Feature Pack 3.
To have something to play with, we created two LUNs on the MSA, each 250 GB and mounted them on the server. Then we copied some data (200 GB) to each of these volumes.
The Baseline
Afterwards we created four jobs in Backup Exec, each backing up 100 GB of data from the MSA, all of them using the backup to disk storage as their target.
Then we started one of he jobs to see, how fast it would run. Afterwards we started two jobs in parallel and finally all four jobs at the same time.
The Movie
You can watch the video recorded for this post on YouTube:
Please continue reading about this test series in part two, where I start backing up “real” data.