mixture of LTO4 and LTO5 drive for HP MSL 6000

[demo4119]

Currently i have customer configured with 2 LTO4 and found that the weekly backup talk days to complete . Due to the restriction of the tape drives .

Intended to advise customer to purchase another 2 x LTO5 drives to be configured on the exisitng library with additional storage unit with LTO5 type.

can this be concurrently run well in Netbackup 7.5 environment?

[Will_Restore]

Adding LTO5 is fine. 

But are you sure the tape drives are the bottleneck? 

[Mark_Solutions · Accepted solution]

As long as the library supports it it will be fine - probably need to use a different density in NBU for them so it doesn't try to put an LTO5 tape in an LTO4 drive.

As wr says - are you sure that it is the tape drives that are the issue

In cases like this it is ofter better to implement disk and then duplicate to tape which will give far better performance, especially as it overcomes the buffering issues experienced with tape

[demo4119]

Yes. I have checked the current backup throughput that the weekly full backup is the bottleneck . As there isnt any sufficient disk space for disk staging for weekly and monthly. Unlike the daily can stage to disk then to tape.

[Marianne]

Will was asking if the tape drives are the bottleneck.

What kind of throughput are you seeing?

If not more than 100Mbytes/sec (sustained throughput per drive), then the tape drives are not the bottleneck.

Have you verified media servers' capability to stream these drives?
Network throughput?
Clients' ability to read and send data fast enough?

Is multiplexing and multistreaming in place?

If the LTO4's and LTO5's are going to be attached to the same master/media server, this will probably not be a good idea. Very few media servers have the physical capability to stream more than 2 tape drives. 
I would say that your customer will need a minimum of 1 Master/media server plus 1 additional media server.

To get back to your original question - Mark has the right answer...

[demo4119]

Thanks for your advise . I have checked those mentioned above. Due too no. of policies and size of the backup data , mostly of the jobs are in queue and fine tuning on the master also has been taken care of.

[Mark_Solutions]

How much data do they have? - you can get a good sized disk array these days for probably not much more than 2 tape drives would cost

If the backups are more efficient going to disk they could then churn away all day duplicating to disk (which will drive the tape drives at full tilt constantly as you are feeding the dat alocally - hence my advice earlier

One customer of mine did all backups to tape and they were running from 6pm to 10am the next day

We kept the same number of tape drives and introduced disk and the first night it went into use it had completed all backups and duplicated everything to disk by 7am - so it took 3 hours less to do both the backup and duplication

Hope this helps