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How fast can a disk-backup system go?

Surprisingly enough this is the wrong question.

The real question is how fast can your backup environment go?

Well over 90% of the time the backup environment is sending data slower than the disk-based backup product is designed to perfom. The bottleneck is more often your environment.

So you buy a disk-based backup system rated at 100meg and you implement it and get 50meg.

That is almost always because the backup server or environment is the bottleneck.

So how do you tell if your environment is the bottleneck or the disk-based backup product is the bottleneck?

The trick is to take your existing backup environment and write directly to good old-fashioned straight disk. Measure the performance. That performance is the benchmark. If the disk-based backup products perform faster, when it comes time to implement, you will not see the rated speed of the disk-based backup product because it can only run at the speed at which your backup environment is feeding it.

What could be slowing the backup environment down?

• Configuration of agents
• Configuration of backup servers and media servers
• Bandwidth
• NIC cards
• The server that the backup application is running on

All of these slow down the backups.

Run the test to straight disk to know the performance of your environment and then you can see if the disk-based backup system slows that down or not.

In short...know the performance of your environment before you throw the baby out with the bath water.

Bill Andrews is President and CEO of ExaGrid Systems a company that provides fast, low cost and scalable disk-based backup with data de-duplication solutions.