Slow throughput with Brightstor 11 on LTO

[Paulusdu]

We've just added an new Dell LTO 110 to or Dell Dimension server and installed Arcserve Brightstor 11.
Everything works fine, it backs up what we want on the server, but the specs on the Dell site say that we should be getting around 32MB per second. But at the moment we are getting 3MB per second.
Has anyone come across this before or is it just a configuration setting i have missed on the SCSI or Arcserve side?

Cheers

 

[davidmichel]

A good place to start is faq478-4685 & faq478-1039.

 

[Paulusdu]

After much searching and trawling of various sites. I found the answer. The Dell drive we use is a Seagate Ultrium06242, on seagate web site you can download an application called TapeRx. This can set some configurable options on the LTO drive, one of them being Tape Speed, which i set to 16MB /s, so our LTo is now doing 840 mb / min local and 640 mb/min remote.
Very handy.

 

[velley]

do u mean increasing the "tape speed" with TapeRx? just wondering if there's any impact to the tape drive life.

 

[Paulusdu]

I can't se how it can affect the life of the drive, the TapeRx software just varies the speed at which the tape can physically work at. Similar to a cd burner. All i have done is set it to the maximum write speed that it can physically do and its within the manufacturers specification.
Its not like over clocking a cpu or anything.
Its cut my backup time from 8 hours to 3 hours.

 

[velley]

besides, for BAB 11, have u tried its new feature - multiplexing?