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Mixing LTO4 and LTO5 Media (And Drives) in same Library

Seth_E
Level 6

Hi there,

 

I would appreciate some advice from you experts out there.

 

I have one library with 2 LTO4 drives and 2 LTO5 drives. All media previously was LTO4 and everything works geat.

We are running low on storage slots and the company I work for will not invest in an expansion unit for our TS3310 library (shared with TSM).

We have two major pools. ONSITE and OFFSITE. I've replaced all onsite tapes with LTO5 media (to allow for more data to be copied to tape, and thus, free up slots) and now, all offsite tapes will be LTO4. Everything is working fine. All jobs write to disk, than disk duplicates to ONSITE and OFFSITE without issue.

ONSITE = LTO5 media (never leaves the library

OFFSITE = LTO4 media (sent out daily)

LTO4 tapes are HCART

LTO5 tapes are DLT (netbackup auto configured this)

My concern is the integrity of data. Will data that is copied from LTO4 to LTO5 media be consistent? Could we potentially run into issues where we recall an offsite tape and the images are bad (due to copying between LTO technologies).

 

Thanks for any advice you can offer.

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION

Accepted Solutions

Mark_Solutions
Level 6
Partner Accredited Certified

There will be no issues here - there is no hardware to hardware copy - it is handled all by NetBackup using the bpduplicate process which reads the one tape (in effect it runs a restore) and then writes that to the other tape

So all dealt with by bptm - will works fine regardless of tape types

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4 REPLIES 4

RamNagalla
Moderator
Moderator
Partner    VIP    Certified

I belive there should not be any issues... but I am also looking for experts comments on this...

Anonymous
Not applicable

I can't think of any issues. The only real test is a test restore before the real thing ever bites.

Mark_Solutions
Level 6
Partner Accredited Certified

There will be no issues here - there is no hardware to hardware copy - it is handled all by NetBackup using the bpduplicate process which reads the one tape (in effect it runs a restore) and then writes that to the other tape

So all dealt with by bptm - will works fine regardless of tape types

RiaanBadenhorst
Moderator
Moderator
Partner    VIP    Accredited Certified

There wont be any issues, its the same as it you're copying from LTO to SDLT or T10000 or disk or dedupe disk. The entire image is read and placed on the new destination, and it happens via the media server.

 

Your new LTO 5 drives can even write on the LTO4 media (should you have configured them as the same media type (HCART). LTO drives will read write back one generation and read back two ... one generation back, and read-compatibility two generations back.