When considering what to do to upgrade your backup system, I have always maintained that one of the most important questions you should be asking is: what is wrong with what I got? (Proving nothing more than that the English language will be the first victim of this post.)
What is wrong can have many answers. It is not reliable. It breaks. It is slow. It costs too much. And so on. But one of the very frequent answers is this: my backup takes too long.
As I have said many times before, there are a lot of things that can cause a backup to bottleneck. And there are a lot of things that you can make infinitely fast and your backup will still be no faster overall (yes, LTO3 and LTO4, I am talking about you.)
And until we understand the big picture, and which components in that big picture are contributing to a slow backup, it is a little irresponsible for any of us on the vendor side of things to come out and claim that disk will "fix" your backup and make it faster. It might. Or it might not.
Continue reading "Something Doesn't Add Up (And Never Will)" »