HP Data Protector Software Performance White Paper

Evaluating Data Protector performance

This section highlights Data Protector performance, and uses the results of the previous

sections for finding the bottleneck and giving recommendations. The procedures of this section

should be transferable to many customer environments.

The Data Protector performance was tested and analyzed for two different types of file server

and a classic Microsoft Exchange Server 2003:

• Typical file server data with a common amount of files and a broad range of size (KB/MB)

• Problematic file server data with millions of small files (KB)

• Typical Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 data

The performance tests were executed by configuring single and multiple backup/restore streams

– also called concurrency or multiplexing. The results of single and multiple stream tests were

compared and analyzed. In some cases, multiple streams could be slower than single streams.

The tests included the measurement of performance (MB/s), CPU load (%) and memory usage

(MB) of the backup server and, if applicable, the client. Windows performance data was

measured with the built-in tool Perfmon and HP-UX performance data with the built-in tool

vmstat.

Note: Memory usage is not documented in the following sections because all tests showed that

the memory usage by Data Protector itself was very little and never exceeded 46 MB. For

example, for the HP-UX local backup of typical files, Data Protector did not use more than 19

MB memory, and for the worst case with the Windows local backup of typical files, not more

than 46 MB memory. These days, 46 MB usage is not relevant for servers that have gigabytes

of memory.

Note: The Cell Manager performance was not logged because it is beyond the scope of this

white paper. During testing, some quick Cell Manager performance checks confirmed that the

Cell Manager was far away from becoming a bottleneck. The CPU and IDB load was very little,

even while saving and restoring the file server with millions of small files. The test scenarios of

this paper were not sufficient to put the Cell Manager under pressure.

Data Protector configuration

The backup and restore tests were executed with the following changes of Data Protector’s

default configuration:

• 256 KB tape drive block size as described in the section

HP StorageWorks Ultrium 960 tape

drive configuration on page 38

• Only one file system tree walk for Windows NTFS file systems with millions of small files as

described in the section File system tree walk on page 38