Good morning, I could use some suggestions for improving the backup time for our Network Appliance. Below is the write up that my Sys Admin submitted describing the problem. Thanks for the help.
Situation: We have a Network Appliance (NAS) hosting approximately 8 million Windows files (CIFS). Due to disk constraints, we are not able to use snapshots and due to some other customer induced limitations, we cannot use NDMP for backups. We have implemented a "proxy"/redirection server that backs up the CIFS files via a unc path name to a TSM 5.33 host running AIX. Our issue is in walking through 8 million files per night in a backup job. The nightly backup delta is approximately 40GB. However, just to access and check 8 million files to see if they meet the backup criteria is taking too much time. The CIFS backup is split into 3 separate batch jobs that run simultaneously. The longest job (about 3 million files) takes almost 20 hours to run. Would NIC teaming gain us any time savings during the backup? I feel the bottleneck may be our AIX system since the Windows server has to get the meta data for the CIFS file, check it against the TSM database, and determine if that file needs to be backed up. That is a lot of traffic between Windows host, TSM server, and Network Appliance for every single file. During the backup time, the CPU is at about 70% on the Windows host, and the NIC is rarely higher than 50%. TSM Server Information: We are running TSM 5.3.3 on AIX 5.3. The server is an IBM 7026-6H1, 4 processors and only 2 Gb Ram. The TSM database is almost 200 Gb with 300 clients. Windows Server Information: We are currently using the Windows TSM client version 5.33c under Windows 2003 Server Standard Edition on an HP DL380 dual 2.8 GHz Xeon processor with 2.5 GB of RAM. We have three batch files running the DSMC command line utility scheduled by the Windows scheduler. We have a dual port HP NC7781 NIC card. We are using only one port connected at 1GB. Debbie Haberstroh
