I am recently working on an environment need to back up a 10TB SQL server by Networker and Data Domain. By utilizing DDBoost ans saveset “MSSQL:”, the backup job could be done in 13 hours for the daily full backup. This is not the worst result to backup a SQL server in 10TB,  but we still can optimize it with some settings in Networker.

After some investigation, in this SQL server, there are three 3TB databases(db1, db2 and db3) and 15 small databases. The performance can be optimized as below:

1. In Networker NMM SQL backup options, adopts multi stripes instead of  the default stripe setting “1”. When using multi stripes to backup SQL database, the backup job will split a single database file into multi parts and backup them in parallel. This will significantly improve the performance for databases with large size.  Use “-S” in backup command and I use 4 stripes in my case.
2. For Networker save set configuration. Use Multi databases names to replace single saveset name “MSSQL:”. There might be a limitation for Networker version 8.2.3.8 that, when using multi stripes, Networker can only backup databases in sequence. Therefore, to increase the parallel, we need to manually add individual database names into the save sets.
3. To ensure all the databases can be picked up during the backup. We need to create two clients with the same name. The first client includes the main databases and the second one contains the rest databases. Use “-h” in backup command to exclude the databases existing in the other client.

Therefore, the final client configuration will be shown as below figure.

After putting both clients into the same backup group, the backup now can be finished in less than 6 hours comparing with 13 hours before optimization.