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cyberninja's avatar
cyberninja
Level 6
13 years ago

Tape usage

Hello,

We just upgraded to NetBackup 7.1.0.2 and we are now useing LTO5 tapes. The proplem is we are getting a lot of tapes when we do a vault. So we think that the tapes are not being filled up. Is there a way for us to use less tapes?

Info:

OS - Solaris 10
Tape libary - Storage Tek SL500

We do most backups to disk and run vault jobs to send tapes to offsite storage.

Any help would be great.

7.1.x and Earlier
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  • Mark_Solutions's avatar
    Mark_Solutions
    13 years ago

    Just looking at your figures ...

    15314.463 GB in one week = 15TB = 10 native LTO5 tapes > + allowance for different retention periods and using additional tapes which you were using 4 drives so possibly to an extra 8 tapes per week  = 10 + 8 = 18 tapes in 1 week

    You say in an early comment "Anther thing we had 23 LTO5 tapes this week, for 2 weeks. Normally under our old setup (NetBackup 5.6) we had about 8 LTO3 tapes a week. "

    From your figures it would use 36 tapes at native rates for 2 weeks - this means that they are both full and compressed (apart from the 8 part used tapes caused by 4 drives and 2 retention periods)

    Your old system used to use 8 x LTO3 tapes .... well at 2:1 compression (so 800GB per tape) 15TB would need to use 19 x LTO3 tapes.

    I think what you are seeing is actually about right - using less drives will save on tape use but your data must have grown

    Hope this helps - you are actually doing about right!

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  • Marianne's avatar
    Marianne
    Level 6
    13 years ago

    About permission to post pictures - I have never experienced any problems posting pics.

    Have you tried the tape list report or bpmedialist? This report will also tell you if tapes are being suspended on a daily basis instead or only at eject time.
    I think Bill's suggestion over here may 'hit the nail on the head'.

  • cyberninja's avatar
    cyberninja
    Level 6
    13 years ago

    I'm not allowed to show outside people host names or IP address. If I do post something I need to make changes to these items.

    I will lookup how to do a tapelist report. I ran the bpmedia command, there are many SUSPENDED tapes.

    We have changed most of the vault jobs to use only 2 tapes. I'm currently trying to chart our tape libary usage so we can have longer write times with out the jobs cueing up. The tape libary is only used to do vault jobs. Normal backup are made to a NetApp. What do you think would be the easiest way to do this?

    Thanks for your help.

  • Marianne's avatar
    Marianne
    Level 6
    13 years ago

    Tape List report is the same as bpmedialist. It can be found in the Reports section of the GUI.

    As per Bill's post on 27 March, check your daily vault profiles that are doing duplications only. Ensure that they do not suspend the tapes. If they do, nothing more can be appended to them by subsequent duplications.

    Only the eject profile should suspend tapes.

  • cyberninja's avatar
    cyberninja
    Level 6
    13 years ago

    Ok this what the Vault Manager says.

    tap choose backups
    Backup started: 7days, 0hours, and 0 days, 0 hours
    attributes checked: clients - list clints, backup types - Full backup, media  servers - lists one media server, backup policies - <include all backup policies>, schedules - <include all schedules>, Retention levels - <Include all levels>

    tap duplication
    source backups reside on: disk only
    Storage unit: mediaserver-hcart3-robot-tld-0
    Write drives: (was 4) 2
    volume pool: ENCR_offsite
    Retention level: 2yrs
    Media Owner: Any

    tap catalogbackup
    checked - skip the catalog backup step

    tap eject
    off-site volume pools:  ENCR_offsite, Vault_catalog
    checked - Suspend this sessions's media - at time of eject
    checked - send email
    Eject mode: checked - Deferred eject

    tap reports
    report header: 'company name' offsite
    checked - use report settings from vault management properties - ( all grayed out)checked summary dis list, all media inventory(*), Non-vault images
    Report mode: deferred reports

     

    Thats all the settings

  • Mark_Solutions's avatar
    Mark_Solutions
    Level 6
    13 years ago

    Just looking at your figures ...

    15314.463 GB in one week = 15TB = 10 native LTO5 tapes > + allowance for different retention periods and using additional tapes which you were using 4 drives so possibly to an extra 8 tapes per week  = 10 + 8 = 18 tapes in 1 week

    You say in an early comment "Anther thing we had 23 LTO5 tapes this week, for 2 weeks. Normally under our old setup (NetBackup 5.6) we had about 8 LTO3 tapes a week. "

    From your figures it would use 36 tapes at native rates for 2 weeks - this means that they are both full and compressed (apart from the 8 part used tapes caused by 4 drives and 2 retention periods)

    Your old system used to use 8 x LTO3 tapes .... well at 2:1 compression (so 800GB per tape) 15TB would need to use 19 x LTO3 tapes.

    I think what you are seeing is actually about right - using less drives will save on tape use but your data must have grown

    Hope this helps - you are actually doing about right!

  • cyberninja's avatar
    cyberninja
    Level 6
    13 years ago

    Thanks for your help.

    We have a new storage device (tarradata) in our new setup. we where just serprised to see 23 tapes when they are so much bigger then the old tapes. I think that moving from 4 drives to 2 drives per vault will fix the issue. Are other big data backup is going off line so that should also help.

  • cyberninja's avatar
    cyberninja
    Level 6
    13 years ago

    Looks like I was wrong about the new storage device (tarradata). We have not been vaulting there backups.