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inefficient backups...

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by flyingknees

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Can anyone offer a suggestion?
I currently have two remote locations and each site holds an SQL server of great importance. My backups occur at Site A and they run very well however, backups of the SQL server at Site B run over the T1 connection and are extremely slow...often lasting close to a day. This I believe is a disaster waiting to occur. What can I do to speed up this process? Is there a way for me to replicate the SQL server or perhaps utilize a faster T connection? What of a SANs solution and fiber connected backup environments? How would I go about setting something like that up if need be?
Any help is greatly appreciated...

3 replies

by evkuo

Well, I'm going to assume MS SQL server, but I believe the principles work for any one. For a cheapie solution, you could dumping to disk, either right to a server on Site A (which might be slower) or onto a server on Site B and then schedule a task to copy it over to Site A. I'd also look at doing Transaction log backups, too, since those will probably be smaller and might be good enough to get a full day's backup.
SAN will only really help you if you're bottleneck is your disk read/writes, which it probably isn't. It's probably the T1 so the key would be getting the data over to Site A and doing a local backup or maybe doing your backups locally at Site B. You can also setup replication, but I'm not enough of a SQL expert to tell you how that's done.

by wlbowers

Is it a dedicated T1 or a dsl connection.

If it is a dedicated T1 make sure there is not a low CIR rate. (Commited Information Rate)

SANs solution if it is off site would still have to go over the T1.

How much information is being transmitted.

There are solutions avaible if these questions are answered.

Lee

by flyingknees

Yes, I forgot to mention it runs over a dedicated or point-point T1 connection. The CIR is consistent however I believe the problem lies in the amount of data it has to backup - about 30GB and counting. In addition the server it is pulling from is a P4 2.4GHz machine that is already laden with the responsibility of keeping the MSQL database and handling client connections to the database. I am considering grabbing a secondary server and planting that here at my site and setting up MSQL replication. I've never done that before so it'd be a first.

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