Providing an overdue update to wrap this thread up.
It turns out I wasn't seeing the forest for the trees.
Parallelizing the copy did in fact yield much larger results than the single
threaded copies.
In the end we used a home-brewed python script to parallelize the copy using
cp, rather than r
Reed,
I'd like to add to Sebastian's comments - the problem is probably rsync.
I inherited a smaller setup than you when I assumed my current
responsibilities - an XFS file system on a RAID and exported over NFS. The
backup process is based on RSnapshot, which is based on rsync over SSH, but
the