Optimizing Backup with HP TurboSTORE

Optimal h/w configuration
l H/W compression:
Enabling hardware compression alone gives a small percentage of
performance improvement.
For best backup performance, it is recommended to use HIGH software compression, or LOW
software compression along with hardware compression.
l System configuration:
The backup performance not only depends on the backup software and target drives used,
but also on the host machine configuration and the system load. TurboSTORE creates one
process per target drive in parallel storeset. Hence it is recommended to have one-more
processor than the target drives in the parallel storeset. I.e., on a n-CPU machine its
recommended to have n-1 tape drives. The type of compression should be selected
depending on the CPU load.
l Load balancing:
It is very important to balance the load of each tape drive during parallel backup. If some tape
drives finish their jobs much earlier than the others do, it does not improve the overall backup
performance. TurboSTORE uses a simple algorithm to divide the files among parallel tape
drives. It stores these files in the sequence they are passed to store command and never
moves them around to balance the loads. It is recommended to load balance by providing
proper mix of files in the fileset if the backup contains some very large files.
Conclusions
Best performance is achieved with COMPRESS=HIGH and MAXTAPEBUF options. The HIGH
compression option is CPU intensive.
When the CPU load is moderate, it is recommended to use COMPRESS=LOW and MAXTAPEBUF
along with hardware compression.
Proper load balancing with fileset can give best
performance in parallel backup.
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White Paper : DLT Performance with TurboSTORE
10/17/2008
file://C:\Documents and Settings\cmmc\My Documents\wtec database\TSWhitePaper.html