Question : Problem: Network Speed seems slow for Gigabit

HI Everyone!

   Our current server infrastucture is all Gigabit and we are only recieving speeds from server to server of about 500MB/m - 600MB/m. I've done the math and the maximum theoretical throughput is 125MB/s with Gigabit speed so 500MB/m - 600MB/m seems really slow. In most cases that would be "ok", but since we are backing up large amounts of data daily our backups are taking in the vacinity of 13 - 14 hours. I have come to find this 500MB/m - 600MB/m speed both through BackupExec 11d and also by timing a large file transfer between two of the servers. Does anyone know how we can improve the preformace of our network to ascertain better network speeds?

I should also mention that I was pointed to http://support.microsoft.com/kb/936594 by Symantec Tech Support. It seems that most of my Windows 2003 Servers don't have the option that is listed in the KB article. I did make the changes listed on our Backup Server but that did not seem to make any difference.

Thanks you in advance for your help!

Answer : Problem: Network Speed seems slow for Gigabit

Perhaps by focusing on the network here we are missing the forest for the trees.

What hard drives are on each end of the line.  There are not many, if any, hard drives, even at their best theoretical performance which can saturate a GB ethernet connection.  Take a top of the line 7200 RPM drive.  Running from the inner edge it can do 35MB/s at its best.  Now add in that you likely have some fragmentation, your not reading/writing files sequentially from the drive, etc.  and you are not going to get the sort of performance you are looking for.  RAID 0 or 5 (or 6) should really improve this.

On the network side, I will point out that Cat 5e can do GB ethernet no problem.  It does need to be wired acording to spec however, which means good terminations keeping the twists etc.