On 2018-03-23 08:25, [email protected] wrote:
"Ryan, Lyle (US)" writes:
The server has an 11TB filesystem to store the backups in. I should
probably be fancier and split this up more, but not now. So I've got my
holding, state, and vtapes directories all in there.
In this scenario, I would think there's no point to a "holding" disk.
I use a holding disk because my actual backup disk is external-USB and
(comparatively) slow. So I backup to a holding disk on my internal
SSD, releasing the client and the network as soon as possible, and then
copy the backup to the backup drive afterwards. But in your case, I
don't see any benefit.
There are two other benefits to having a holding disk:
1. It lets you run dumps in parallel. Without a holding disk (or some
somewhat complicated setup of the vtapes to allow parallel taping), you
can only dump one DLE at a time because it dumps directly to tape.
2. It lets you defer taping until you have some minimum amount of data
ready to be taped. This may sound kind of useless when working with
vtapes, but if the holding disk is on the same device as the final vtape
library, deferring until the dumps are all done (or at least, almost all
done) can help improve dumping performance, because the dump processes
won't be competing with the taper process for disk bandwidth.
