Streamline duplicaton with SLP

[nbugermany]

Hello,

I am in the process of moving our envirnoment(NBU 7.1) from using vault as the duplication process to SLP.  We write out data to disk based storage and then from there cut it to tape. When we used vault, it would run a job that looked for all Full backups for example from all the policies and then kicked off one job to write all this data to tape.  When using SLP is there a similar way to accomplish this same effect? I would like to make it so all the duplication job run at the same time and not stagered, as they current are depending on when the policy starts the backup job.

Thanks for the help

[Mark_Solutions · Accepted solution]

To use SLPs you need to have Enterprise (Advanced) Disk or de-dupe - basic disk cannot be used.

If you want all duplication to run at a specific time then you need to upgrade to 7.6 which has the SLP scheduling feature - otherwise you would need to script something to disable (inactive) the SLP and re-enable it when you want the duplications to run.

You will also need an SLP for each retention period you use (Daily / Weekly / Monthly)

If all of the above are OK then it will do exactly what you want

Hope this helps

[Marianne]

You may want to upgrade to NBU 7.6 that allows for SLPs to be scheduled.

Other suggestions:

Create a SLP for FULL backups. 
Select the appropriate STUs and retention levels for backups and duplications.
In the FULL schedules, select this SLP in 'override Storage Unit'.

Next, look at SLP parameters that can be customized in LIFECYCLE_PARAMETERS file.

The first on that may want to customize is MIN_GB_SIZE_PER_DUPLICATION_JOB.
The default is 8 GB.

If the MIN_GB_SIZE_PER_DUPLICATION_JOB setting is small, more duplication jobs are created. If it is large, fewer, larger duplication jobs are created.

See Best practice for SLP and AIR : http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH153154  for more parameters that can be customized.

There is no 'right' or 'wrong'. You need to test settings/parameters to get the best possible results for your environment.