High performance hardware other than devices

Performance of computer systems

The speed of computer systems themselves directly impacts performance. The systems are loaded during backups by reading the disks, handling software compression, and so on.

The disk read data rate and CPU usage are important performance criteria for the systems themselves, in addition to I/O performance and network types.

Advanced high performance configuration

Data Protector Zero Downtime Backup solution provides a means of shortening the application downtime or backup mode time and reduces the network overhead by using locally attached backup devices instead of network backup devices. The application downtime or backup mode time is limited to the time needed to create a replica of data, which is then backed up on a backup system to a locally attached device.

For more information on Zero Downtime Backup, see the HP Data Protector zero downtime backup concepts guide.

Using hardware in parallel

Using several datapaths in parallel is a fundamental and efficient method to improve performance. This includes the network infrastructure. Parallelism boosts performance in the following situations:

When to use parallelism

Several client systems can be backed up locally, that is, with the disk(s) and the related devices connected on the same client system.

Several client systems can be backed up over the network. Here the network traffic routing needs to be such that datapaths do not overlap, otherwise the performance is reduced.

Several objects (disks) can be backed up to one or several (tape) devices.

An object (disk or files) can be directly backed up to several (tape) devices using several XCOPY engines.

Several dedicated network links between certain client systems can be used. For example, if system_A has 6 objects (disks) to be backed up, and system_B has

Concepts guide

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HP B6960-96035 manual High performance hardware other than devices, Advanced high performance configuration