Move from Dataprotector to Veeam

[wim17]

Hi forum

A customer of ours I currently using HP dataprotector with an LTO5 library. They have a back-up speed of around 128mb/s.
Because they have a lot of data their back-up tapes up to 18 hours and they want to have it faster.

We want to offer them Veeam Enterprise with a LTO7 unit but the customer is sceptical about it. They think that HP to HP is always the fastest.
When I look at this link about LTO speeds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open I see that LTO7 can have speeds up to 300mb/s and I would like to know if it is reasonable to think that we can make that kind of speed. They have a HP DL380e Gen8 E5-2420v2 back-up server and the libraty can the connected directly to it.

Would it be possible for the server/disks/Veeam to get to a speed of 300mb/s or are they better of with Dataprotector?

Thank you!
Wim

[mkretzer]

Hello,

we also had DataProtector. And it was always faster than Veeam because of one reason: Multi-Streaming. Veeam seems to be still unable to stream a backup with multiple streams to tape even with DataMoverLocalFastPath=1. We have case open with Veeam just now (02110807).
Our current temporal backup storage (we move back from REFS to NTFS right now) uses 24 nearline drives and can deliver more than the 160 MB/s LTO6 can do uncompressed if more streams are used. Still, backup only runs at 58 MB/s. Even our "production" backup storage which supports a bigger block size with 96x Nearline drives cannot always keep the device streaming (it runs at ~100 MB/s). That storage should deliver way over 1 GB/s.
From my point of view it is not possible to keep a modern tape drive streaming if there are nearline drives at the source, just because of latency of the drives. It gets worse if your storage only supports a small block size because it has to do even more seeks.

Markus

[skrause]

We get between 90-130MB/s to an individual drive in our IBM LTO-5 library with Veeam for larger Backups to Tape jobs. File to tape jobs are typically a lot slower. We use hardware encryption on the library and do not do hardware compression (we just send the compressed Veeam Backup files).

With any implementation, your mileage may vary.

[mkretzer]

@skrause What is your source storage and block size?

[DaveWatkins]

Veeam seems to be still unable to stream a backup with multiple streams to tape even with DataMoverLocalFastPath=1

According to this the default was changed to 2 (which is faster than 1) some time back. Perhaps that setting is holding you back now?

[mkretzer]

We set it to 1 as support suggested. It got slightly faster but not as fast as we would be able to backup with DataProtector...

[skrause]

@skrause What is your source storage and block size?

Our source storage is a mid-range SAN connected to our Windows repository server (same as our Tape library is connected to via a different FC HBA). Our tape block size is 524288, though we did some testing with different block sizes and never found much difference in performance between the different settings when we were dealing with slow transfers due to software encryption.

[wim17]

Thanks for al your answers.