Boosting Storage Backup Speed on Virtual Servers

Due largely to the popularity of virtualization, backups aren’t what they used to be. The amount of data to contend with has mushroomed and the technologies available to meet storage needs are increasingly complex. Enterprise IT Planet looks at one engineering firm’s travails and how it resolved them.

With virtual servers on almost every enterprise’s road map, backup-related issues are increasingly on the radar.

Backups used to be simple. Attach a disk array to a tape drive and away you went. Then
the volume of data mushroomed, and things got a little bit more complicated. Now, with so
many virtualized systems to deal with, backups can be problematic.

At professional engineering firm Wade Trim, for example, the move to a virtualized
environment resulted in severe backup slows. According to Scott Landrum, senior network
administrator at the company, the backup window at one of its data centers stretched from
14 hours prior to virtualization to three full days.

“Backup throughput dropped from 2,000 Mb/minute to 400 Mb/min,” said Landrum of Wade
Trim, a 350 employee firm headquartered in Detroit with a total of 21 offices in 8
states. As well as engineering, it provides planning, landscape architecture, operations,
surveying and environmental science services.

Wade Trim was backing up 14 TB of Windows data throughout the enterprise. In addition
to the office’s files, the company had to backup lots of large CAD, GIS and image files.
Two-thirds of the data sat on 25 Windows servers and an EMC Clariion cx3-based SAN at the
head office. The company had three trays of CX-3 disks served by two SAN switches. At
this location, everything was backed up onto a Dell PowerVault TL4000 tape library. As
local branches generally had only one or two Windows servers, data was being backed up
onto much smaller Dell PowerVault tape libraries.

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