Tape Drive Storage Indication

[girish_nair1984]

Hi

We are using Symantec Netbackup 7.6 with Dell powervault 114T( with LTO-5 drives) . Is there is any indication to know how much data is written on the tape and what is the total capacity of tape.

And when the tape is full, is there any kind of alarm generated in Symantec Netbackup.

Thank You

[Marianne]

NetBackup 'Media List' report can be used to see how much data is written on a tape, but there is no report that can tell you how much space is left. NBU has no idea of capacity and will simply keep on writing until 'Media Full' message is received from the tape driver.
The amount of data that can be written to a tape depends on the tape capacity and compressibility of data.
Once you have a couple of 'FULL' tapes, you will have a good idea of tape capacity in your environment.
Best to use manufacturer's native capacity documentation to do media capacity planning.

There is no 'tape full' report/alarm, etc in NBU.

Use 'Media Written' report on a daily basis to get a good idea of media usage for each day, then run 'available_media' script every day before backups are due to ensure sufficient media. Add one or 2 additional blank tapes to allow for potential failures.

(available_media is in ...netbackup/bin/goodies.)

[girish_nair1984]

Hi 

I ran a command .../netbackup/bin/goodies/available_media.  The output is as attached 

Also after running a command .../netbackup/bin/admincmd/bpmedialist -mlist -l  . I got the output as follows

[RonCaplinger]

Are you questioning something here?  I odn't understand why you posted these two screen shots.

The available_media script shows you which tapes are not full, and therefore have space available.  This will include both scratch tapes (tapes with no data cataloged on them), as well as tapes that are only partially full.

The bpmedialist command has options to format the output and to change what data is displayed.  Try entering "bpmedialist -?" and you can see the available switches. 

[girish_nair1984]

@RonCaplinger.

I wanted to know, how to output will normally look like, if the tape media is full. 

[RonCaplinger]

To see which tapes have been marked FULL, use "bpmedialist -mlist -U".

NVJ901   8    166   11/15/2007 09:47  11/16/2007 09:20  hcart3   799080333     7
              MPX   INFINITY        09/26/2011 15:37  FULL
           0

Or to see just a count of how many are full, by media server ownership, "bpmedialist -summary -U":

*******************************************************************************
MEDIA SUMMARY FOR SERVER GROUP UNRESTRICTED_SHARING_GROUP ON Tue 07 Apr 2015 11:25:22 AM CDT
*******************************************************************************

ACTIVE   FULL  SUSPENDED  FROZEN  IMPORTED  WORM  BE_MEDIA  ENCRYPTED
   74    790     8618        4        0       0       0          0

Number of NON-ACTIVE media that:
       4 - are currently EXPIRED
            002774 expired 07/02/2010 01:42
            003876 expired 09/14/2014 05:04 (SUSPENDED)
            004700 expired 09/12/2014 19:55 (SUSPENDED)
            004714 expired 04/07/2015 05:02 (SUSPENDED)
      16 - will expire within 1 week
            004718 expires 04/08/2015 05:02 (SUSPENDED)

[girish_nair1984]

@RonCaplinger.

From the post above,  does it means 790 tapes are FULL

[Nicolai]

Yes

You can also go to the media section of the Netbackup GUI.

Netbackup will as well display media status here (full,frozen,suspended, empty etc etc).

[RonCaplinger · Accepted solution]

Yes, the second output indicates we have 790 tapes in the Unsrestricted Media Sharing Group that are full.  This version will list the number of tapes by which media server "owns"those tapes (or in this case, the Unsrestricted Media Sharing Group).

The first output just shows that media ID "NVJ901" is FULL.

[girish_nair1984]

Thank you all for the support