Last night’s backup time was cut once again by running 15 concurrent streams from agent to disk. The differential backup took only 2.7 hours instead of the 3.5 the night before (10 streams). Disk to tape took 1.4 hours instead of 1 hour but that’s not a problem because it’s an "offline" process. It’s tough to really compare 2 sequential differentials because the second will always have more data, especially 24 hours later during the week. I compared the 2.7+1.4 hours against a Tuesday differential from 2 weeks ago. The previous backup took 13 hours! This Disk Staging Option really works.
There was a downside to going with 15 streams. We appeared to have some network congestion. Two agents had communication timeouts. I’ve reduced the number of stream to 8. This will give us a good opportunity for comparison and analysis.