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Storage Units and Staging Question

abaack
Level 3

I'm trying to cleanup and optimize our Netbackup policies.  We have policies that do 'disk to disk to tape'.

Most policies are similar to this:

Weekly Full to Disk - Retention 2 Weeks

Daily Incremental to Disk - Retention 1 Week

Weekly To Tape - Retention 3 Months

Questions:

1. If I want to start using the Staging Policies (all of our Storage Units are basic disks), there is no place to set retention.  From reading online it sounds like retention information comes from the policy?  My plan was to remove the Weekly to Tape schedule since that would now be performed by the Staging Policy... should I bump the Full to Disk retention to now be 3 months and maybe increase the incrementals retention also since I want them to stay on tape longer?

2. Doing this will start filling up the Storage Units more I would assume since all the retentions are becoming longer.  From what I've read, once the storage hits 98% it starts cleaning out images as long as they've been offloaded to tape already until the storage hits the 80% full mark?

3. Our disk storage on each media server is identical, a Promise RAID-5 array with one 36TB volume (drive letter).  How the last person set it up was a Basic Disk storage unit for every type of policy we would use.  For example, I have an Exchange, VMware, EVault, etc storage units.  But they all reside on the same physical disk.  The path to each would be like F:\Storage Units\TYPE.  So they all show the same % full all the time.  Is this proper and how would it impact the Staging Policy whenever they hit the high watermark and start to try cleaning up images?

Thanks!

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION

Accepted Solutions

Mark_Solutions
Level 6
Partner Accredited Certified

If you use the same tape volume pool for everything then you dont have a problem

Choose one of your current disk storage units to be your "chosen" one and direct all backups to that from now on.

You can make that one a Staging storage unit within its properties.

As you say .. once the images have expired from the others just delete them all from the configuration.

View solution in original post

5 REPLIES 5

Mark_Solutions
Level 6
Partner Accredited Certified

1. If you use staging you set your retentions in the schedules - it will stay on disk as long as it can up to that retention period working on a managed storage basis .. so once duplicated to tape the disk copy becomes eligable for being expired

2. That is right - the values being determined by your high and low watermarks - provided that they have been duplicated to tape

3. You need a Volume for each storage unit not a folder system - otherwise the space management just do not work - when using staging you cannot have more than one disk staging folder per hard drive otherwise you get real issues (for example.. you run you weekly backups which almost fill up that drive .. when you come to run daily / monthly backups there is no space left and they dont have any images intheir own folders to expire to free up sapce - so backups fail)

Hope this all makes sense and helps

abaack
Level 3

So if we're stuck with the one 30TB volume... what would be the recommendation?  Wiping out all the old storage units and creating one?  Not sure how we could even do that since live images exist on the current storage units.

 

Staging policy aside, would there ever be a reason to setup multiple storage units onto one disk volume like the previous person did?  Just wondering if it was setup wrong to begin with.

Mark_Solutions
Level 6
Partner Accredited Certified

With just one storage unit you could not use different tape pools when you come to write to tape

If you only use one pool of tapes then you are OK to use just one disk area for everything

So the restirction is when it comes to duplicating to tape

If you have daily / weekly / monthly tape pools you need to start again and partition you disk into different drive letters - if all your tapes are in teh sam epool then you can use just one disk

If you have Enterprise Disk licenses then rebuild it as Enterprise disk and use Storage Lifecycle Policies to make life easier

abaack
Level 3

Do you mean the Volume Pools?  We use the defaults essentially, NetBackup, Scratch and CatalogBackup.

So this would be okay?

We don't have the Ent Disk license unfortunately.  My coworker had the idea of duplicating all of the policies and changing the storage unit to a new one on the root of the disk volume.  Let the old storage units eventually expire and then once they're empty we could get rid of all of the old storage units and keep the one 'DSSU' folder on the disk volume.  Would that work?

Mark_Solutions
Level 6
Partner Accredited Certified

If you use the same tape volume pool for everything then you dont have a problem

Choose one of your current disk storage units to be your "chosen" one and direct all backups to that from now on.

You can make that one a Staging storage unit within its properties.

As you say .. once the images have expired from the others just delete them all from the configuration.