How to improve backup speed: backup storage performance

[Gostev]

Some more useful information for those looking to reduce your VCB SAN backup window.
All information below is courtesy of Johnny Lundgren

Equipment

ESX-server (Update 3)
FS RX300 S4 directly connected with a Emulex 4Gbit PCI-e HBA to a SAN storage.

SAN Storage
FS FibreCat SX80, 6 x 146GB in a RAID5 set where the test VM resides.

Veeam Backup 3.0 Server
FS RX300 S4, 5 x 500GB SATA in a RAID 5 set as backup-destination (two volumes a small C: drive and a large D: drive). Directly connected to the same storage as above via a Qlogic QLE-220 HBA (4Gbit/s). Windows 2003 Standard Edition 32-bit, VCB installed.

Test VM
Fresh install Windows 2008 Enterprise Edition 32bit, 40GB C: drive.

Veeam Backup Job
All default settings, VSS enabled.

Performance Test Results

Test 1 (default target storage settings - Write-Through enabled)
Full backup: 36MB/s
Incremental backup: 143MB/s

Contacted Veeam with the results, support has suspected target storage performance issues.
Contacted FS support, advised to enable write-back cache on the destination SATA RAID.
Changed RAID controller cache to Write-Back.

Test 2 (Write-Back enabled)
Full backup: 106MB/s
Incremental backup: 207MB/s

Conclusion

Choice and configuration of destination storage is also crucial to get high performance values. RAID5 sets based on SATA drives generate very bad write performance when RAID controller cache is set to Write-Through instead of Write-Back (WT was set by default in this case).

[aseesing]

Maybe a good idea to move these permanent posts into the section announcements?