Optimizing your backup speeds

I have listed a series of areas that can help you increase backup performance and help you to avoid over-running an maintainence windows:

Networking:

- Enable port aggregation on your switches creating an etherchanell with something like LACP or PAgP (Cisco Switches only.)

- Enabling Jumbo Frames - by increasing the frame-size you reduce the header overhead, although on unreliable connections this can be more trouble that it's worth!

Disk Configuration:

- Utilize fast media such as SSD, SAS 15k

- Consider modifying RAID configuration for faster read / write speeds e.g. RAID 0, RAID 10, RAID 50.

- Performing defragmentation on the disks.

OS Configuration:

- Disabling SMB Signing: If you are backing up over SMB this can have a dramatic increase of performance. For instructions see here.

- Configure NIC teaming in Windows Server 2012