Forum Discussion

Puffy's avatar
Puffy
Level 6
16 years ago

How to utilitze LTO4 tapes

 Hi,

Currently I have a libaray with LTO4 drives. However we are still using LTO3 tapes. We have no problems with this setup.

Recently we acquire some LTO4 tapes. Hence I trying to see whether the backup speed will increase with these new tapes.

However it seemed that the speed is the same with both types of tapes after some testing.

I wonder whether do you need to define STU or hcart for these LTO4 tapes in order to utilize the tape speed ?

Thanks.

7.1.x and Earlier
Backup and Recovery
Features
NetBackup
  • Puffy's avatar
    Puffy
    Level 6
    16 years ago
     I guess I answer my own question :)

    I did some testing.

    It seemed like a new STU is needed. I also need to change some drives to new hcart.

    Hmmm interesting. 

    Guess I have to do some planning on how to set this up.

    Thanks for reading anyway.


  • Puffy's avatar
    Puffy
    Level 6
    16 years ago
     Hi,

    Sorry but although the new setup works but the speed is still the same as LTO3.

    Hence I wonder whether there is any bottlenecks somewhere or any things that I have overlooked ?

    Thanks


  • Dion's avatar
    Dion
    Level 6
    16 years ago

    By setting up Storage units and media in NetBackup as hcart, hart3 etc. does not change the way the tapes are read and therefore will not help in increasing the speed that the tapes are written to.  These configuration options are only a logical grouping mechanism that NetBackup uses allowing you to group storage units and media.  For example, NetBackup will prevent hcart3 media being loaded into a STU of type hcart.

    For you to use both LTO3 and LTO4 media in LTO4 drives, you've obviously had to set up all components (LTO3 and LTO4 media and LTO4 drives) as the same type.  This allows NetBackup to load an LTO3 tape into an LTO4 drive.  Once loaded the physical LTO4 drive make sure that the backwards compatibility kicks in and it will write to the LTO3 media.

    Regarding your situation where both the LTO3 and LTO4 media are being written to at the same speed, I would suspect that your bottleneck is elsewhere - possibly network, local disk speeds, Fibre channel.  I would try to eliminate these factors first.  You can also look around on these forums or the net for some performance tuning settings for your library and drives that might help.

    I have the same setup and I get different speeds when duplicating data from local disk SAN to LTO4 and LTO3.  I have two dual port HBAs in each media server and I've separated my FC disk traffic from my FC tape traffic.

    Cheers
     

  • FrSchind's avatar
    FrSchind
    Level 5
    16 years ago
    This guide will help you to find and eliminate the bottlenecks:

    http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/281842.htm

    one single LTO4 can write the data much faster than a single Gbit networkl link can transmit it. to read the data from disk as fast as LTO4 goes, you need a pretty fast disk (high end SAN). these two issues are likely to happen and cannot easily be resolved. if this is your problem, you might want to add a fast disk cache on your media server as a netbackup disk staging storage unit.