Backups are the thing that test your network system more than anything else.
When backing up the data, bandwidth plays a vital role since it directly affects the performance of a backup solution.
That is why, it is important to properly provision the bandwidth for purposes like Backup, Recovery & Replication jobs.
Normally, a backup solution tries to utilize the entire bandwidth to complete the backup operations as quick as possible. In most situations, the backups are scheduled round the clock as frequent as every few mins for the mission-critical systems. In those cases, if a backup solution transfers the backup data at the maximum available speed, then there are chances of the network (LAN/WAN) getting overloaded.
As a result, it will create an impact on the company’s production environment thereby affecting the application performance and user experience.
To avoid this, most IT admins choose to run the backups during non-business hours.
Yet, there are critical systems & applications that need to be backed up every few mins to restore the data from the latest and nearest recovery point.
Thus, running backup jobs only during non-business hours cannot offer near/continuous data protection for critical machines. To address this issue, Vembu BDR Suite provides Bandwidth Throttling feature.
What is Bandwidth Throttling?
Bandwidth Throttling lets you set the bandwidth limit for your backup and replication jobs. This helps you to run your backups even during business hours without disturbing your production environment.
Set the bandwidth limit that you can afford for backups while leaving the rest for production purposes. This ensures that only the allocated bandwidth is used and doesn’t take up your entire bandwidth.
How to configure Bandwidth Throttling?
For onsite backups, Vembu provides bandwidth throttling feature as part of the configuration settings in its distributed clients (Vembu VMBackup / ImageBackup / NetworkBackup). The data transfer takes place from the client end to the main backup server, you will be able to set the bandwidth limit for all the backup jobs that are configured from the client.
Similarly, Vembu also provides bandwidth throttling option for offsite backups (Own-datacenter / Vembu Cloud).
The bandwidth throttling feature has different settings that include:
i) Throttle bandwidth always – Specify the maximum throttle limit on client machines that range in Kbps, Mbps, Gbps. Then, as per the backup schedule, the data transfer will take place round the clock at the specified data limit.
ii) Throttle Bandwidth From & To – Along with the throttle speed, this option lets you set the time period during which the bandwidth throttling need to be performed. Mostly, business hours are set and then throttling is applied. So that, during non-business hours backups can use the entire bandwidth while also not affecting the production works.
iii) Disable during the weekend – With this option, bandwidth throttling can be disabled during the weekend providing complete bandwidth usage for backups. Since most of the companies do not have any production operations going on during the weekend, this option can be apt for such cases.
Understanding the importance of bandwidth throttling and implementing it will resolve many issues like network overloading, performance degradation of business systems that can be caused due to backup workloads.
Bandwidth throttling helps in reducing the network traffic and lets you achieve balanced network usage in your work environment. It also ensures that your backup jobs don’t affect the performance of your production workloads even though you can afford only lesser bandwidth for the backup operations.
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