support-555807 (4/30/2014)
We have a database that is over 612Gb and growing. Our backup is being done on tape using Backup Exec 2012. This process starts at 10PM and runs until 6AM every day.
The backup direct to tape will be the bottleneck since you're constantly waiting for the tape device which will be inherently slower than a hard disk drive. As Gail has advised, backup to disk first then let BackupExec pickup the SQL backup files to tape.
Backup compression, whether native or 3rd party, will help. There'll be a CPU hit but you will be writing less data to disk since the data is compressed.
How big is the final backup file for the database?
support-555807 (4/30/2014)
One option is to convert the server into a virtual server (VMware) where more spindles are working with the database.
This is not a VMware specific option. You can get more spindles purely by sweet talking your storage admin to provide the appropriate disk devices.
Virtualising a server can have anywhere between a 10-15% performance overhead. Virtualisation is a consolidation exercise, you can get good performance if it's done correctly but even then there is the Hypervisor overhead.
support-555807 (4/30/2014)
We started out on VM but the performance was horrible.
My point exactly!
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