I have a problem in my office that I’ve been trying to take care of for at least two weeks now. Ever since I was out of the office for a week and some people “fixed” the backup server, we haven’t been getting any backups done. At least any offsite backups. Most of our data is backed up to disk first, but still, it’s scary.
Anyway, we have a Dell PowerVault 124T LTO-3 tape changer (supports up to 16 LTO-3 tapes) running with Symantec’s Backup Exec 11d. At least we do now. When things went down, it was 10d. After upgrading (it’s broken anyway, right?), I could back up files, but at 3 or 4 Mb/second! (In case you don’t know, it should be running around 2,000 Mb/second). At that rate, a full backup would take me about 85 days, by which time it would be abysmally out of date.
Well, it seems I found the problem after many hours working on it: enable Mutliple LUN support on the SCSI channel where the devices live and update the SCSI drivers in the system (Windows 2003 Storage Server version). It looks like I’m getting the throughput I expect to see, but I’m not 100% sure that it’s solved—a final test is running right now and I’m about to check on it. But I thought I’d get these notes down for anyone else that runs in to this problem. By the way, I’m using the Dell-provided tape and autoloader drivers, and not the Backup Exec drivers.
I tried to buy some Cat-6 cable today. I also tried to get a 500′ box of Cat-5 (plenum). Nobody carries either. I don’t need 1000′ of Cat-5 plenum (the only kind available). I had no choice with Cat-6, nobody even carries it. Sometimes I hate living here…