Jim,

I can't help with a technical solution, but I can say that it is definitely
worth continuing with a Notes agent. It is most definitely the only
solution for properly securing your Notes data.

Here's some info about our Notes backups ;

a) We use different policies for Notes and NT backups. We use the same
volume pools and storage units, with a little multi-plexing, we do NOT use
the same policies for Notes and normal O/S file system backups.

b) We configure our NT (Windows 2000, 2003) backups to exclude *.box, *.ntf,
and *.nsf, because the Notes agent will pick these up.
We add the following to the exclusion list of each NT client that has a
Notes or Domino database ;
*\*.box
*\*.ntf
*\*.nsf
This ensures that no matter what level a ".box" or ".nsf" or ".ntf" file
appears at, then it will still be excluded from the NT file system backups.
There's no need to backup the data twice.

c) Make sure your Notes policy only specifies the actual path to the Notes
email data, e.g. ;
D:\Lotus\Domino\Data
and any other Notes only paths required. Talk to your Notes administrator
to find out where any and all of the Notes specific data is located. You
should not have ALL_LOCAL_DRIVES, SYSTEM_STATE or any other Drive or folder
path combinations in the "policy" "Backup Selections".
Maybe the policy that you use for Notes backups hasn't specified just the
one or two folders that you need to scan, so maybe the Notes backup agent is
scanning the entire system looking for the kind of data that it is supposed
to backup.

d) Make sure each client has a properly specified Notes.Ini file and the
path to the main Notes executable area, so, for each client in the "Lotus
Notes" tab of "Client Properties" we have things like ;
INI Path: C:\Lotus\Domino\Notes.ini
Path: C:\Lotus\Domino

e) We also get our Notes administrator to add "BACKUP_NO_TIMEOUT=1" to the
Notes.ini file of each and every Notes client - this stops big timeout
delays from Notes when user's files are locked up tight.

f) And finally, just occaisionally one or two of our Notes backup jobs will
complete with a status '1'. When we run a problem report, we see one or two
(but sometimes up to ten) user's ".nsf" gets missed. What I'm saying is
that occasionally, the Notes backup fails to pick up a couple of different
user's notes data. It's always different users, and there seems to be no
pattern to it. Just a quirk that we live with, because it doesn't happen
very often.

g) The default NetBackup client network I/O packet size is either 16KB or
32KB. This is fine for the old days of NetBackup v3.4 and servers with
about 9 to 20 GB of data. But these days most Notes servers are in the 100
to 200+ GB, and most networks are gigabit these days. So we have changed
all of our clients to use 256KB buffers (in the Client Properties, Windows
Client, Client Settings tab), and also added a NET_BUFFER_SZ parameter file
of 262144 (i.e. 257 KB - i.e. the client's 256 KB + 1 KB for NetBackup
overhead) on every media server.

We have Windows 2003 SP1 servers with Lotus Domino Notes v6.5.x, Gb LAN,
LTO1 FC drives, NetBackup v5.1 MP3. We get over 12 MB/s for our Notes
servers. So, yes you should expect a greater throughput. I'd stick with
it, if I were you.

Dave.



"Jim Dalton" wrote in message
news:435625e4@ROSASTDMZ05....
>
> Dear All
>
> My queries are about performance and about Notes: my problem is that when
> trying to back up a notes server , Netbackup performance is DIRE. I have
> a large number of files that reside on an iSCSI mount of a very fast NAS
> and the standard bpbkar32 client just crawls along: the NAS, the gbit
> network
> and the LTO2 drives are sitting there twiddling their thumbs watching data
> arrive at just a few Mb/sec.
>
> So: first off, can anyone explain to me what the Notes client actually
> buys
> me? Im not using it currently, I just back my data up as flat file, but
> theres
> no point in buying the Notes agent if it doesnt improve the speed of my
> backup.
> Im assuming the agent buys me integrity but to be useful it also needs to
> buy me performance. Ideally try-before-buy would be excellent.
>
> Secondly, is there anyone out there that has any performance hints to get
> this thing to move? Files (many tens of thousand) are quite sizeable
> (tens/hundred
> MB). Oh and the data are on Windows servers. Or perhaps there are some
> other
> options within netbackup that can be used to lever performance to an
> acceptable
> level. 20M/sec is standard on many of my servers.
>
> Thanks and regards,Jim
> Netbackup master is v5.1 under Solaris 9 / FC LTO2s.