Backup & Restore ISCSI SAN

Hi Lierop

Welcome to the forums!

The best way to achieve this would be to connect your iSCSI volume to your Acronis backup server (Storage Node), then create a centralized vault that each Acronis agent will backup to.

It’s not possible for each agent to directly backup to a single iSCSI storage volume, the best way to understand this is to think of iSCSI as though you have a physical disk connected to a PC, that PC needs to control and manage the file system (eg, NTFS) and generally these files systems are not able to allow multiple PC’s to access the same disk drives at the same time (there can only be one PC controlling the file system). Generally you will need some kind of cluster aware file system if more than one system is to access the same iSCSI/SAN volume.

The other option you can look into if you do not want to use the centralised storage node method and want each agent to have directly access to the iSCSI volume is to crate multiple volumes and give each server/workstation access to its own iSCSI storage were the agent can backup to.

In regards to the backup speed 80GB over 12 hours is very slow (6.6GB/hour, 114MB/Min which works out to be around 1.9MB/s) What I would sugest doing is an isolation test to try to find out where the slowdown is happening.

For example if the iSCSI volume is connected to your Acronis backup server and formatted as a volume, try to copy files from the local backup server to the iSCSI volume and see what speeds you get. If that runs well (eg, 50-100MB/s)... Then I would suggest creating a network share on that backup server and copying some files from the machine you are backing up to that newly created network share (that is the iSCSI volume over the network)..etc..etc.. This will help find where the slowdown is occurring. Also keep in mind depending what iSCSI unit you are using if it’s a very low end home based unit some of them do run VERY slow and at times using those units in a NAS setup offers increased performance, allows multipul access (as the NAS unit manages the file system) and will also allow you to get agents to backup directly to that storage device.

Hope that helps... All the best and please give us all an update on how you go.

You can also mount the ISCSI-Volume on your windows servers and make ordinary windows shares available to your users. Do this if you don't need the additional features of a Storage Node/Centralized Vault.

Acronis runs pretty quick over ISCSI. At least it can max out the 1GBit-Network connection I dedicated it to.