Images on Tape

[Talmo]

Hi,

I have a NBU 5.1 MP4 with two media servers run on Solaris 9.

I have just implemented a Falconstor VTL into this environment and made a mistake on setting up compression on the virtual tapes. As I set the maxmium size of the vtape to large so when the compressed data from this tape is exported to a Physical ADIC i2k. (LT02 drives) they will not fit on to the physical media. I have fixed the vtape size issue so the maximum size is smaller so the compress data will fit on the physical media okay.

The trouble I have it that I have loads of vtapes that are to large to export physical media. I don't have the option of waiting for thes tapes to expire as I don't have the space available on the VTL to do this.

I have tried duplicating the images of the oversized tapes to other tapes but this takes ages to complete and will take a long time for 50 + tapes

I had thought of duplicating  enough images and expiring them on the oversize tapes so it will take the tape size under the vaule I need to export to physical tape. The trouble is that these images actually don't get removed from the tapes so the size of the tape stays the same. I will have to expire all the images on the tape to reclaim.

Is there a way that I can zero the data for these images on the tape then the size vaule is under the vaule I need to export the rest of the images onto physical tape?

As it stands I can't think of a way that I can achieve this without duplicating the images off.

Any help or pointers would be great

Thanks

Christian

[TreyT]

Duplication is really the only way to do this unless you expire some images to try and reduce the image/tape size down as you say. NBU will skip over the expired images if you duplicate the tapes using an image-list bid file.

You might want to considering duplicating the volumes from the VTL to a DSSU and then expiring the VTL volumes and then you can either duplicate back to the VTL on the new smaller media or duplicate to your physical media from the DSSU. You should get better speed going from VTL to DSSU as it's disk to disk.