Backup Recommendations

[corvusrex]

Currently we have an IBM BladeCenter S with three individual blades installed on it. Our veeam server is currently a VM on one of those blades, although we also have a physical server acting as a second proxy.
Our backup device is a Promise 1840i.

We've recently ugraded our PROMISE with 16 4TB hard drives.

As it stands right now, backups are handled by the physical proxy and backed up directly to an iscsi logical drive on the PROMISE. The data transfer bottleneck is 99% at the source (internal storage modules on the bladecenter) but averages about 30-46 MB/s unless it's a full backup image, in which case it seems to top off at 10 MB/s.

We've experimented with both iSCSI and NAS network shares as locations for backups but I'm curious as to what other users might recommend with this setup.

[veremin]

Having source as a bottleneck means disk reader spent all of the time reading the data, because the following stages are always ready to accept more data for processing. Though, you might want to deploy a virtual proxy server (or use the default one), specify it in “Hot Add” mode and see whether this type of setup increases performance rates or not.

Thanks.

[corvusrex]

Currently the veeam server itself is a VM in hot add mode.

The bottleneck issue likely won't change as the backup location is on the promise array and separate from the vm storage.

[Vitaliy S.]

We've experimented with both iSCSI and NAS network shares as locations for backups but I'm curious as to what other users might recommend with this setup.

iSCSI backup target is a more preferable option rather then network shares, at least from the reliability point of view. As to the bottleneck stats, then if it is source, then I agree that changing backup mode would not change much. Btw, are you using network mode for your physical proxy?

[corvusrex]

We had been, yes. Typically if we had set it to anything else, it would switch over to network anyway as the bladecenter's internal network storage and the external promise aren't 'technically' on the same network.