Full to Differential – still runs long 1

[hardrockclassic]

Greetings All,

Working on a 3 year old Dell server with ATA RAID drives.

It is running Windows server 2003 std. with Veritas 10.0 and AOFO.

The server has been running a Full backup nightly, but the job ran 11 hours to backup 72.1GB.

This is a CPA firm and they are working about 15 hours a day at this time of year so we need to shorten up the backup time.

So, I just changed over from a Full to a Differential backup.

A successful test run of the Differential completed in 15 minutes, so I scheduled the job to run for this fist time last night.

The Differential job backed up only 2.3GB… and ran for over 7 hours!

There was one exception reported: Backup- C: C-DRIVE The item C:\System Volume Information\catalog.wci\00010014.ci in use - skipped.

Any insight yow can provide on how to get this job complete faster would be very welcome.

Thanks for your help, Hard Rock Classic

 

[Zelandakh]

Does it show what took the time?

Remove the sysvol from the selections. By the time you've got the server up enough to restore, the sysvol restore is fairly useless anyway.

What else are you backing up?

 

[hardrockclassic]

Hi

The sysvol backup doesn’t seem to be the issue, it moves right along. The data drive appears to be the bottleneck.

The system is a Dell PowerEdge 1600SC Ship date: 9/20/2004

It has a Standard IDE C: drive for the OS, plugged straight into motherboard.

It has 0nly RAID One on Data the Disks (Striping).

There are 4 disks go into IDE RAID controller, only 3 are listed – Seagate ST316002 160GB IDE. This is consistent with 300GB Data drive. I do not see other one listed as a hot spare.

The drive is a new HP Ultrium tape drive Connected to a new SCSI card from HP installed in the system in November 06.

I downloaded and installed HP Storageworks Library and Tape Tools and tested the drive and controller functionality.

They passed all tests.

I got HP Storage support on the phone and went though the Library and Tape Tools diagnostics with them. They confirmed that the tape drive hardware is working correctly.

The drive firmware was already the latest version, but on the recommendation of HP Storageworks support, I downloaded and flashed the firmware anyway. This will ensure all the factory default values are set.

I defragmented the hard drives.

On the Full backup Job, the throughput rate from the OS array was 415 MB/min and the throughput rate from the Data array is 104 MB/min

On the most recent differential bakup, I got these numbers…

Backup of "C: C-DRIVE"
Backup Type: Differential - Changed Files
Backed up 574 files in 4131 directories.
Processed 822444278 bytes in 5 minutes and 29 seconds.
Throughput rate: 143 MB/min

Backup of "D: RAID"
Backup Type: Differential - Changed Files
Backed up 9010 files in 714708 directories.
Processed 820788893 bytes in 7 hours, 1 minute, and 18 seconds.
Throughput rate: 1.86 MB/min

So it looks to me like this Striped IDE RAID Array is the
bottle neck, but I am not sure what to do to open it up.

If you have seen this type of thing and have some ideas on hot to speed it up, yout suggestion would be most welcome,

Thanks, Hard Rock

 

[LawnBoy]

There's something screwy about this:

It has 0nly RAID One on Data the Disks (Striping).

There are 4 disks go into IDE RAID controller, only 3 are listed – Seagate ST316002 160GB IDE. This is consistent with 300GB Data drive. I do not see other one listed as a hot spare.

If you're using RAID1, it uses disks in pairs. 2, 4, 6, 8 disks, but always in pairs.

Are you sure you're not using RAID5?

 

[hardrockclassic]

I am not sure.

This is an unusual box for me. Mostly I see HP servers with SCSI RAID 5 arrays.

Any idea how I can determine the RAID config on this Dell box without shutting down and going in the the ROM Based Config Utility?

Is there a Dell equivalent of the HP Management homepage?

 

[LawnBoy]

Look for Array Manager or Dell Open Manager. Either should tell you what you're running.

 

[Zelandakh]

Backup of "D: RAID"
Backup Type: Differential - Changed Files
Backed up 9010 files in 714708 directories.
"

You've got 714,000 directories. It is traversal that is the problem! Faster disks are required. How much data do you have on there in total?

Oh and RAID1 striping? No redundancy at all. Check this urgently. One goes, it has all gone.

 

[hardrockclassic]

Lawnboy and Zelandakh, thank you both for your replies.

I got Dell support on the line last night, and they had me run a DSET report, which showed the drives are actually RAID 1+0 and are healthy

I think the number of folders is the key. I check against another server that runs normally and there are 24,000 folders on that one vs. 700,000 on this one.

I talked with the business process owners about the huge amount of folders, and they have agreed to let me exclude 520,419 folders from the Differential Job.

Many of these folders are empty. in many others, nothing has changed in them in over a year!

I will let you know how it goes….

 

[hardrockclassic]

Good news: Last night’s differential job backed up 4.3GB in 2 hours 5 minutes.

Before the change, the job backed up 2.4GB in 7 hours 18 minutes.

The throughput rate last night was 23.3 MB/min vs. 1.7 MB/min before excluding these folders.

Zelandakh, thank you for your help in identifying the cause of the slow back up.