Offsite Backups very slow

[baycom]

I have a virtual windows 7 (64bit) with veeam 6. I run a full backup every wednesday and friday and the rest are incremental of all my main servers, and for the others I back them all up weekly on friday. All the local backups probably run at about 60mb and have no problems. I setup an offsite which is across the street and the scenario is as follows.

Virtual Veeam Server to 1gb switch, to 1gb ptp (bandwith is limited to 20mb across our point to point), to 10/100mb switch then to another machine. I put in a simple NAS box and I run the backup with the following settings

Synthetic Full
Compression - low
Target - WAN

Backups run at about 4mb which would take forever and be insufficient. I changed the target to local and it ran at 6mb, bottleneck was the NAS station for both instances. I then setup a PC and ran the backup directly to it but still the same situation accept the bottleneck is now the network. I checked the traffic on the Point to point and it is using everything available (18mb - 19mb).

Is there something specific I should be looking for that I may be missing, something is not passing through the PTP. I have tried many different methods and the fastest I can get this backup to run across a 20mb pipe is 6mb. I am trying to backup about 600gb.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

[kurbycar32]

NAS boxes are tricky when you use them for anything important. The inexpensive NAS systems are great for a small environment but they lack in the following:
1. They usually have a cheap cell phone processor doing the work at a snails pace
2. They almost always use NFS with no options for NTFS, creating a problem for Windows backups
3. They seem to fail for no reason and are usually difficult to recover data from.

That being said I'm sure your aware of all of this and i agree there are time when a cheap NAS is the perfect solution. Heres what i did:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1c3l ... P3iIY/edit

The gist of it is to leverage the virtual hard disk features of windows 7 to create an NTFS virtual disk on the NAS. Perfomance was better for me, plus windows treats it as a native internal storage device. I would appreciate feedback

[tsightler]

Can you clarify the actual speeds of your links. Small "b" is "bits" and large "B" is "bytes". I'm assuming you have a 20Mb/s link (link speeds are almost always measured in megabits per second) which would only be 2.5MB/s. Veeams speeds are always in "megabytes per second" so if you're getting around 4-5MB/s then that about what you should expect with 2-3x compression.

Ideally you should put a proxy on the target side and use the "Write all traffic via this proxy" option when configuring the CIFS repository. At that point you can schedule synthetic fulls, which will happen locally on the target rather than attempting to send full backups twice a week across a 20Mb link.

[baycom]

I can see your point and that would verify/determine the bottleneck is the Point-Point we have in place which is 20Mb. I instead have a system over there to write to vs the NAS box. I setup that system as a proxy and had the backup use the other system vs the server but got slower speeds. I will run this by my network admin and see what he reports back.

In the mean time any other suggestions or solutions to getting an offsite backup would be helpful if this method cannot be accomplished.

Thank you

[Gostev]

Why low compression? Makes no sense when backing up over WAN...

[tsightler]

Yes, that's a good point, why low compression? Typically, for a WAN, "Best" compression is actually better as the backup will be bandwidth limited, not CPU.