Storage Lifecycle Policy question

[brandonn]

In NBU 7.0, my storage life cycle properties window has a Left and Right arrow. I can use them to offset line items in my life cycle policy example:

Backup Test somestorageunit
-> Duplication Test somestorageunit

what does that do? I cannot find any documentation on it...

[Nicolai]

I believe it was something  introduced with hierarchical storage lifecycle policy's. You use hierarchical storage lifecycle when data must be moved numerous times.

E.g.: Disk ->  dedupe device -> tape

[AAlmroth]

Hierachical SLP had to be implemented in order to better control source copy when using duplication. By making a duplication dependant on a previous backup or duplication, the SLP will use the correct image copy as source and not the primary copy as was the only option earlier.

A key scenario where hierachical is required is when you use a two site NBU domain, where backup goes to the primary site's disk storage, and then duplicated to secondary site's disk storage. Say now, you have a tape library at the secondary site, and you would like to duplicate images to tape, NBU would pick the image at the primary site, send it over the WAN link, and then onto tape. This is obviously not very effective. So, with a hierarchy, we can tell NBU to use the image copy at the secondary site as the source copy when duplication onto tape.

/A