Re: Max of 20MB/sec through FC attached LTO tape drive? Overland neo 2000

From: Adam McDougall (mcdouga9@egr.msu.edu)
Date: Fri May 09 2008 - 13:11:54 EDT

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    We've been using 65537k for transfer buffers for at least half a year at
    the recommendation of some docs, and 16384k before that. We also used
    64k block size on the LTO2 tapes because it gained us a few megabytes
    per second (128k did not work), but I hope to avoid going over approx
    63k because some operating systems need tuning or kernel hacking to do
    larger transfers than 64k. We have not attempted a direct SCSI
    connection with LTO4 yet (maybe next week, not on a Friday afternoon
    before the weekend backups start).

    Davies,Matt wrote:
    > Couple of thoughts, increasing the number of buffers, within the
    > performance tab of configure for the tape drive and changing the block
    > size.
    >
    > Cheers
    >
    > Matt
    >
    >
    > -----Original Message-----
    > From: owner-toasters@mathworks.com [mailto:owner-toasters@mathworks.com]
    > On Behalf Of Adam McDougall
    > Sent: 09 May 2008 16:02
    > To: Toasters
    > Subject: Max of 20MB/sec through FC attached LTO tape drive? Overland
    > neo 2000
    >
    > Asking here because we don't have current Overland support for the fibre
    >
    > channel card and I would guess it is more of a problem with the card
    > rather than netapp (we only used the FCO with a netapp), but maybe
    > someone has encountered this...
    >
    > Around 2004 we bought a Overland Neo 2000 tape library with the FCO VIA
    > scsi to FC converter board, and we got at most 20 or 25MB/sec through it
    >
    > (per tape drive) depending if we were writing or reading. This is both
    > with NDMP dumps from the filer disks to tape, and also across the
    > network into the filer to tape with NDMP. The backup software is
    > Bakbone Netvault. Last year we tried attaching this library to a Unix
    > host directly with SCSI and our speed almost doubled. I was floored,
    > and shocked that we spent so many years missing out on performance,
    > although 20-25 was the best I've seen anyone report for LTO2 so I never
    > expected more.
    >
    > Recently we bought another Neo 2000 with LTO4 drives, and I decided to
    > move the FCO card over to it and try again, hoping maybe there was a
    > misconfiguration, but I could not find any and it still acts as if there
    >
    > is a mystery cap on the speed of 20MB/sec (it averages 18-19 after it
    > gets going). I've been all through the configuration of the FCO card
    > and it is set to 160M/sec per scsi bus, tried with and without domain
    > validation, and I even got the FC channel to operate at 2Gbit but no
    > improvement. If I cannot figure this out then I will just attach it to
    > the Unix host with the other neo 2000, but its always nice to have more
    > options. I would not bother operating a LTO4 drive at such a slow speed
    >
    > in production because shoe-shining would probably wear it out and the
    > compression would be sub optimal or non-existent.
    >
    >
    >
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