SLP's vs vault management

[DPO]

Why there is vault management option in NetBackup when we already have an option of using tape libraries as seccondary storage in Storage life cycle policy.

Please share your ideas and thoughts along with the benefits of each.

[mph999]

Because SLP and Vault are totally different.

(1)

The main idea of SLP is to guarantee that the primary copy is not expired, until it is successfully copied.

Vault cannot do this.

(2)

The main idea of vault is to eject and track media.

SLP cannot do this.

Martin

[Genericus]

Also - Vault is best for bulk duplication - i.e. make all your duplication to tape as you prepare to vault.

SLP is better for duplication as you make the backups.

I have many storage retentions and storage pools, SLP works better for me.

If I have one retention and one pool, I might use vault instead.

If I had mulitple customers, and I wanted to duplicate just one customer's backups to tape and eject them - vault would be a good choice.

It really depends on your backup world view or vision for how your process should work.

[watsons · Accepted solution]

They are designed based on different requirements.

Vault came first, with the intention to manage and track offsite media tapes. It has to have a tape library (robot) as a pre-requisite. Duplication is only one of its functionality, but not a must.

SLP came at later stage, with the purpose of more effectively safeguarding your backup data - by duplicating them into secondary storage, be it disk or tape. Apart from just doing that, SLP comes with the capability of better managing your important data which you can categorize into different "Data Classification" (well.. I doubt many users have this mind in place though, I see it as a good practice but some users just simply duplicate everything without categorizing them).

A feature very important to note, as Martin pointed out, SLP does not expire your primary copy until the cycle (to duplicate data) is completed.

And it does not have a schedule, it just starts the duplication by itself, simply because it DOES NOT allow you to "forget" schedule the duplication. But this good intention seems to create some issues as well along the way.. :)