SUSPENDED Tapes?

[Randy_Samora]

NBU was freezing and suspending literally hundreds of tapes and it turned out to be an issue with our HBA configuration. Now everything seems to be running A LOT better, drives are no longer going DOWN on a regular basis and tapes are not being frozen. BUT...i still have hundreds of tapes showing up in my Media Summary report as SUSPENDED? Is there a way to troubleshoot why those tapes get suspended? Should I even be concerned about it? Can I unsuspend them? Is there a way to keep them from being suspended? Has anyone figured out why NBU freezes some tapes and suspends others?

If you have the answers to one or all of these questions, you have a friend for life.

Thanks,
Randy

[Stumpr2]

DOCUMENTATION: How to troubleshoot frozen media on UNIX and Windows
http://support.veritas.com/docs/249632

[Stumpr2]

bpmedia:
-freeze|-unfreeze|-suspend|-unsuspend -m

bpmedia -unfreeze -m -h

NOTE: The vaulting software will suspend volumes as a normal functionMessage was edited by:
Bob Stump

[Raghava_Chary]

Randy,

You can use bpmedialist to find out the staus of all the tapes, once you figure out the tapes which have suspended then you can use the bpmedia command to unsuspend them as suggested by Bob Stump.

Usually netbackup suspends the tapes to "prevent from corruption". After writing some data if the particular job fails for 2 attempt then netbackup will suspend / freeze those tapes to prevent from corruption of the data which is already written.

The following may cause media errors ...
1. Bad tape drives (requires cleaning)
2. Bad tape (tape need to be replaced as it gets older)
3. I doubt, you said SAN drives .. are you using SSO? if yes check for SCSI reset settings in HBA card properties and also check for any device which is connected to the same fabric .. if any one of the device sends a bad SCSI reset that may cause media errors as your drives connected to same fabric switch - May not be applicable to your environment, i just putting my thoughts.

4. Write protection (If the tape is write protected then netbackup will suspend the tape and fails with 84)

If any thought comes across then i can post it here.

Raghava

[Randy_Samora]

I printed out the list and I realized what was happening. You're right, Bob, vault suspends them as part of the vaulting process. Thanks.

[Stumpr2]

And thank you for the points....I'm getting close to getting my masters degree.