NetBackup Performance Tuning

So you are barely meeting your backup window and now you have decided to replace your old LTO2 drives with faster LTO3 drives, or wait, LTO4 is available.  Yeah, let’s go with those.  After replacing your 8 old drives with 8 new ones you are ready to relax and watch things run.  Why is the phone ringing at 2 AM?  Why are backups not finishing within the backup window?  Why are things worse? Too many people assume the tape drive is automatically the bottleneck in their backup environment without making sure that is the case.  Too many people assume there are only two places to worry about performance, the tape drive and the media server bptm buffers.  While these are two places to be concerned about they are not by any way, shape or form the only two places.  In fact in today’s backup infrastructure they aren’t necessarily the first place to look.   If you will bear with me I would like to share in a couple of blogs some thoughts about how to approach the performance question with NetBackup in today’s environment.  It isn’t rocket science but sometimes we forget the obvious so I am going to share my ideas.  This still seems to be a popular topic based on the interest in the NetBackup performance tuning session at Vision each year.   More later. Please share any questions or comments with me.