Transforms

[wocomike]

Hi All,

So, we're backing up to a Drobo B800i, which is directly connected to a physical Veeam box via a crossover cable between the two NIC's. Backup times are fairly snappy, but transforms are painful. We're at a point right now where we may need to abandon transforms altogether. The problem is, we don't have that much space on our Drobo. We can't do reversed incremental, because I rsync our data nightly to a datastore at an offsite location.

I've noticed that when we went to v 6.1 (I think that's the latest?) is when transforms started to take quite a bit longer. It also looks like we have a large amount of RAM usage during a transform.

I talked to support and they indicated that they don't see anything out of the ordinary in the log files.

Is anyone else in this particular situation?

-Mike

[Gostev]

Hi Mike,

I used to have Drobo B800i at home, it was way too slow even for home lab, so I got rid off it (performance was completely unacceptable). If you do not have an option to change your storage, then just disable transform completely and use forward incremental backup. I assume here you already have the latest 6.1 build installed (6.1 Patch 1), as it introduces major performance improvements for transform.

Until the latest patch, the transform algorithm did not have any changes since version 4.0, so 6.1 upgrade is not the reason for your slow transforms. Most likely, there is just much more incremental backup data to handle than what you had 1 or 2 years ago. This, of course, impacts transform duration.

Thanks!

[wocomike]

Oy. I was worried about that. I wonder if anyone wants to buy a cheap drobo

Actually I was just reading a Veeam blog post about server 2012 deduplication. Gives me an incentive to try this because of drive space and not doing transforms.

Gostev - what about a raid 5 array of 4 or so internal 7.2K RPM SAS disks. Would that be able to handle a transform well? Do I need more spindles?

[Gostev]

Depends on the amount of data, and what to consider "well"

[wocomike]

Ok, so maybe there's a better way to handle my current situation. Here's what I have:

28 Day Retention Backup (A couple of SQL boxes and a domain controller)
Forward Incremental
Weekly synthetic full on Friday with transform

14 Day Retention Backup (A few file servers and misc. boxes)
Forward Incremental
Weekly synthetic full on Saturday with transform

7 Day Retention Backup (A few webservers and DNS servers)
Forward Incremental
Weekly synthetic full on Sunday with transform

As I mentioned before, I do rsync style replication, so reversed incrementals aren't ideal
Trying to conserve space... Transform would really come in handy.

Do I just need to buy new backup storage?

[Vitaliy S.]

Yes, I would consider using Windows Server 2012 box with regular hard disks, should give you much better performance rates than you have now. As to the recommended RAID level and disks type, please take a look a this topic, might be useful: NAS RAID level