Backup Throughput Benchmarks
I twisted Mike Watson's arm to let me blog some of his recent time tests on backup. I thought the data was an interesting reference. Emphasis is purposefully placed on reference. Your numbers will sure to vary.
- Data Protection Manager 2007: 100MB/sec (over GigE) GigE, Network, and Network Interface is usually the constraint. Also highly depends on the disk speeds. Our 12 disks SATA backup arrays only give us about 75MB/sec.
- Site Collection Backup: 3.25MB/sec (to disk) STSADM –o backup -url You can do multiple threads, but it really impacts your performance when you got a like 5 threads going. Going from one to two will nearly double, but going from 1 to 5 is not 5X, and blocking will result.
- Native SQL Backup: 150MB/sec (to disk) Using compression gets you about 30% compression with 25% faster backups. Adding multiple threads this can increase, but you risk total system performance at more than about 3 or 4.
- Farm Backup: 35MB/sec (over GigE) With Central Admin UI. If you use disks local to the SQL server (even if over UNC) you will see much much, better performance than remote shares. This is the number most likely to vary from one environment to another since the Index backup is the slowest part, so it really depends on how large your index is and what topology and network you're using for your index server and between your SQL environment.
This information flows well with the post on demistifying and navigating backup strategies.
If your experience is different than this, or you want to add what your third party vendor speeds are, feel free to add to comments for others to enjoy.
