Tape Drive speed and more

Here is a screenshot

Hi Pctechtv

I’ve just done a test backup but using an LTO-5 tape drive, with Acronis software compression enabled the system is able to backup to the drive at around 94MB/s, if I disable software compression in the backup job the transfer speeds then increase to around 135MB/s on our testing system. (Your average transfer rate I believe is at around 21MB/s at the moment (405.8GB over 5.5hours)). You should beable to get more performance out of your LTO drive by checking a few of the items below.

One thing to keep an eye on is the CPU usage on your server as once you start transferring large amounts of data and try to compress it on the fly your CPU usage will increase dramatically so make sure your backup server has enough power, the other thing to check is if your disk drives can read the data fast enough to push it out to tape, we find many customers disk systems perform allot slower than they expect so do some speeds checks by copying files from long location to the other and let it run for a few min (as many systems will buffer transfers so they might look fast to start with but will slow down over longer periods once buffers full up).

The last thing you can do to improve speed is to look at using a unmanaged vault if it’s acceptable for your setup and you are limited by CPU usage and the managed vault does add extra CPU load and on lower end servers when transferring lots of data this can also cause speed issues.

P.S. the testing above was not done on high end servers so you could probably get better performance out of this LTO-5 drive but for this quick testing I believe it gives a good enough example that higher speeds are most definitely possible!

I am comparing ABR to Backup Exec. Using the exact same hardware, I noticed ABR (Priority set to HIGH for the task) is about 1/2 the speed moving the same stuff to tape. Not sure why, but Backup Exec I could crank cpu load higher. ABR peaks near 20% CPU load (normal compression), and even though 75% of the backup is a single TID file, it takes about 6 hours for 400 GB.

Again, same hardware, different software. I think some people use their backup server for other things and be happy to be handcuffed, but not me, so... I wish I could force it to buckle down and get going. Not sure if there is anything I can do differently.

Hi Matt,

Something does not sound right with 400GB in 6 hours (that’s around the 19MB/s mark).

As mentioned above some things you might like to look into is disable compression in ABR11 when backing upto tape drives. LTO drives already have hardware compression, also if you are backing up a large TIB file it’s most likely already compressed as it is so you have 3 layers of compression meaning you will be wasting space and CPU cycles as if you compress already compressed data the file size will generally very slightly but the CPU load will also slow things down.

Another thing to check is what you are backing upto? When you say the same tape drive is getting better speeds in Backup Exec are you using the same device drivers as well? I know Backup Exec user their own custom device drivers and it’s best you install the vendor drivers when running ABR11 (please ensure the driver provider is the manufacturer of your tape drive and not Symantec as we have found this can cause great speed issues at times).

The last thing I would suggest checking is the layout of your backup, are you backing upto a managed vault (storage node) or are you backing up directly to the tape drive via the personal vault? If you have a single server I would suggest using the direct backup method to increase speed and reduce overheads.

I’ve just re-testing an internal tape backup on an older Core 2 Duo workstation with ABR11 (LTO-5) and I’m able to get over 130MB/s when backing up to a unmanaged vault with software compression disabled.

Hopefully some of those details/tips above help you increase speed in your environment, I would also strongly suggest testing the HDD speed in your server.. did you backup the same data when running Backup Exec as we’ve seen many cases were the bottleneck is caused by the disk drivers/IO of the storage system so also worth keeping in mind as well if you are still having issues after the above checks.

All the best with it and I hope you manage to get the speeds up shortly!

Thanks for all the tips, I will try to apply these. Yeah, 400GB in 6 hours plus another 6 hrs to verify actually.

1) I will turn off compression and report back

2) using latest mfr (Quantum) drivers for ABR, and Symantec drivers for BE. From the Quantum website: "commercial backup programs have their own drivers" Yeah, sometimes. I uninstalled symantec's, as I was not expecting to use BE again. I already own VMProtect, and would like to stay in the same s/w family.

3) I have a single backup server if that is what you mean. It is not the file server. This task is backing up the backup server drives C+F. When I select the tape, ABR makes that a personal vault every time. If there is a way to define a task and NOT make that a personal vault, I don't know how to do it. This server is a pretty new Dell PER515 (6 core cpu at 2.4G with 512MB cache).

I have no idea how to turn off the "vault" when I pick "tape" as destination as it is not a visible option when you create a task. Obviously, I need scheduled tasks to avoid the inherent errors of manual operation.

I used to use the nearly defunct Retrospect which would let you set larger amounts of RAM and CPU as desired with an INI file. Is there some way to do that with ABR? This computer can do more work than is being requested here. service_process.exe*32 hovers around 18% CPU and 136408K Memory. System Idle is 77 to 80%.

Ok, I tried, and got 2 samples. If I don't catalog and don't verify, two bad ideas imo, and I don't define a personal vault, then the backup is under 2 hours. Reasonable, except, I want a catalog and I want to verify :). So, very disappointing. I would experiment more, but the trial expired.

Hi,
multiple jobs to same tape at the same time is no problem for HP Data Protector for instance.
Using software compression with LTO-drives is not a good idea - those drives can do a perfect 2:1 hardware compression. Software compression slows down the whole process.
As you may know, LTO-drives require a minimum data transfer rate for the so called "streaming mode".
Minimum for LTO-4 is 23-25MB/s, maximum is 120MB/s. With hw-compression you should be able to write ~860GB per hour to the tape.
Depending on the compression factor (look at how much data you're fitting on tape before you hit the Physical End of Tape (PEOT) mark) you have to recalculate the transfer rates by multiplying the transfer rates with that factor.
If your disks can't deliver that minimum stream, the LTO-drive has to work in start/stop mode, which is horrible for the drive & the tape and really lousy slow.

On the other hand: ABR seems to to have a problem with data transfer rates, even with disk2disk...

I think LTO 4 tape is not compatible in acronis backup 11.5, since i was purchase the acronis backup, there is no a perfect week or month or day that backup has been successfull, everytime ill check the backup status everymorning its always appear the status is 12% mode and does not proceed to backup anymore so i need to cancel the backup again but the another problem is the tape its always said that the tape vault is unavailable at the moment..in this scenario, i need to delete the centralized vault again and again for the nth time and create a new tape vauilt to work it properly again..then i create a new backup plan for another day for testing so mind stress day, i do not know if my backup will run perfectly in the other day whenever i go to office and check it in the morning.. anyway you can see the attached file some of the problem we encoountered, much appreciated if you inputs regarding some of the other problems here.

note: on the backup stop error, you will noticed that the standarserv1 server the status backup is 0% and there is no progress on tape device.

Timothy Padua wrote:

I think LTO 4 tape is not compatible in acronis backup 11.5, since i was purchase the acronis backup, there is no a perfect week or month or day that backup has been successfull, everytime ill check the backup status everymorning its always appear the status is 12% mode and does not proceed to backup anymore so i need to cancel the backup again but the another problem is the tape its always said that the tape vault is unavailable at the moment..in this scenario, i need to delete the centralized vault again and again for the nth time and create a new tape vauilt to work it properly again..then i create a new backup plan for another day for testing so mind stress day, i do not know if my backup will run perfectly in the other day whenever i go to office and check it in the morning.. anyway you can see the attached file some of the problem we encoountered, much appreciated if you inputs regarding some of the other problems here.

note: on the backup stop error, you will noticed that the standarserv1 server the status backup is 0% and there is no progress on tape device.

Hello Timothy,

Thank you for posting and discussing this issue in our forum.

I want to thank Datastor Australia supporting you.

I want to apologize for the trouble you have while backing up your environment.

This thread was opened in the section for older versions of Acronis Backup & Recovery. In your account I could see, that you are already using the latest version Acronis Backup & Recovery 11.5. The section about tape devices in our user guide contains a definition of supported hardware. Please take a look to the Peculiarities of backing up to tapes. 

That the backup task hangs at 12% indicates that there is a problem not related to tape. It is more at the beginning and around the snapshot itself. In this situation I recommend to use our Acronis Customer Central, in order to get assistance. Please export the logs and create a system report of the affected machine (client and Acronis Management Server) and contact support. You will find all available support options in our Customer handbook.

If there is anything else we can do for you, please let me know.

Thank you.

Dear Admin,

I had already reported this to the customer support but no one can configure out the problem that we had encountered, however we still experimenting a backup option like the scenario we have done by confiured the compression in to none level' and the option of backup priority into slow so that i can;t affect the other backup processing, and another thing is that its take it to longggggg or even runnning in 8hrs and above but still its running and its hard to predict if the backup is still on process.. im losing my patient to solved this issue but still i believe acronis can make it in possitive way...so far still using i need to change the backup plan into simple and not used the custom option, i wish it will work from it, anyway let me share the custom backup that i made see the details ff below:

1st option:

Monday - Inremental - LTO TAPE
Tuesday- Incremental - LTO TAPE
Wednesday- Incremental - LTO TAPE
Thursday-Incrementa - LTO TAPE
Friday-Differential. - LTO TAPE
Last friday of the month is snapshot or full backup - NAS

2nd option

Monday-full backup for the specifc files only - LTO TAPE
tuesday-Incremental-LTO TAPE
Wednesday-Incremental-LTO TAPE
Thursday-Inrementa_LTO TAPE
Friday-Differential-LTO TAPE.

Note: in everyweek or per week im using 1 LTO 4 TAPE only because of each capacity with a terabyte up tp 1.6T and my data files backup have the size up to 800GB only.

Pls Let me know if you have any ideas or other option on my setup...

Thank you

Timothy

Hello Timothy,

Did you find a solution to this problem you're having? I have the exact same issue and Acronis support are not much help at the moment, if you have found a solution could you please share that with me please.

thanks

Hi Bobby,

Actually up to know i didn't find yet any solution, i just let it go whatever it takes, im already losing my patient to find the solution on LTO Tape 4 drive into acronis backup, however the acronis has made a new version product of 11.5 but still i didn't upgrade yet my acronis application since my acronis support has been expired.