Re: 3494 and tapes question.
Hi, If you can't expand your library capacity here are some tips for you: 1. Move your archive data offsite if possible.. Archive retention is based on time, not on versions like backups. You can organize the space reclamations better . 2. You don't have to put back a tape as soon as it needs to be reclaimed. Write a scipt that checks the reclaimable space on your offsite volumes, and move them onsite when you have more of them, or on a regular basis. 3. Organize your vault, especially if you have a lot of tapes offsite. At my site we mainly do archiving, so I have separate shelves for different retention time archives. 4. As for restores: either you check manually for required tapes when doing a restore, or you can set up some scripts to query the tsm server. In my case I wrote a small C code to let the TSM server log its messages to the standard Unix syslog service (I can send it for you, runs on AIX). Since we have a separate server for collection and analyzing syslogs, I just put a new rule into the syslog analyzer to send me (or the operators) a mail when a tape request arives from the TSM server (check out Logsurfer. Its free, and quite good.). A simple reply to the mail checkes in the media. (It needs to be put into the library first, of course. :) ) I hope this helps you, but again: you should avoid offsite volumes. It's just a pain in the lib. :) Imre Csatls Solaris TSM Admin Budapest Bank Rt, Hungary -Original Message- From: Farren Minns [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: 2003. janur 15. 17:47 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: 3494 and tapes question. Hi TSMers I am looking at what to do in the next year or so when our tape library becomes full. Baring in mind that we don't do much in the way of restores (most backups are for DR), is it feasible to remove tapes from the library and just keep them on site in case they are requested for a restore, reclamation etc. Does anyone out there do this kind of thing and how does it work for you? Thanks all Farren Minns - John Wiley Sons Ltd
Re: 3494 and tapes question.
Thanks to everyone on this. Looks like the answer is 'NO!' then. We don't have the need to do it yet, but I just wanted to put the feelers out there. I guess the boss will have to stump up for a new frame or some drive upgrades. Thanks Farren - John Wiley Sons Ltd Please respond to ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent by: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] cc: Subject: Re: 3494 and tapes question. I would so strongly recommend that you do not remove onsite storage volumes from you library if you can help it at all. Yes it will work, but when you need to do restores, or reclaimation management becomes a full time job. When we out grew our system I had a similar situation, I ended up having to write a perl script to query the server every 5 minutes and email outstanding requests to my OPS team. Although there are ways to find out what tape one might hold a nodes data while preparing for a restore, there is no easy way to know which tape has the active data. This makes tape shuffling very probable. Simply put, if there is a way to keep it all in the robot, do so! Craig Riley The Children's Hospital in Denver UNIX / TSM Admin -Original Message- From: Farren Minns [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Wednesday, January 15, 2003 9:47 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: 3494 and tapes question. Hi TSMers I am looking at what to do in the next year or so when our tape library becomes full. Baring in mind that we don't do much in the way of restores (most backups are for DR), is it feasible to remove tapes from the library and just keep them on site in case they are requested for a restore, reclamation etc. Does anyone out there do this kind of thing and how does it work for you? Thanks all Farren Minns - John Wiley Sons Ltd DISCLAIMER: CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE: The information contained in this message is legally privileged and confidential information intended for the use of the individual or entity named above. If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient, or the employee or agent responsible to deliver it to the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any release, dissemination, distribution, or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please notify the author immediately by replying to this message and delete the original message. Thank you.
3494 and tapes question.
Hi TSMers I am looking at what to do in the next year or so when our tape library becomes full. Baring in mind that we don't do much in the way of restores (most backups are for DR), is it feasible to remove tapes from the library and just keep them on site in case they are requested for a restore, reclamation etc. Does anyone out there do this kind of thing and how does it work for you? Thanks all Farren Minns - John Wiley Sons Ltd
Re: 3494 and tapes question.
I am looking at what to do in the next year or so when our tape library becomes full. ... Assuming that you don't have room for another frame, your management could consider upgrading to higher-density drives and effectively increase the capacity of your library. Too costly? They need to consider the cost of coming up with an externals scheme, the cost of misplaced external tapes, the cost of missed mount requests, etc. all of which impacts the business's bottom line. Richard Sims, BU
Re: 3494 and tapes question.
that becomes a real nightmare fast ! I've had to do that in the past and I can say that it really REALLY isn't what you want to do ! How big is your library ? I'd look into adding a storage expansion frame. OR look into drive upgrades from B's to E's... that alone doubles your capacity, then if you get K tapes you double again (so you end up with 4x the capacity) Last time I did it, I was just trying to make things last until we moved an atl, at which time the added capacity would be added. We had to bring in tape racks, spend hours (generally a full day) checking tapes out, putting them into the racks (making sure to keep them in order), putting scratch tapes in, checking them into TSM. Now generally about 3 days later we would have to do all this again... going to a new section in the tape rack to put this group of volumes in so we could keep things in volser order (no, our racks weren't large enough to have absolute slots for all possible volsers) OH and make sure and plan on working at least one weekend day and maybe two because every now and again you will have to take all the tapes out of the rack, sequence them all and put them back in the rack... Now after the HATE calls about how a restore failed of some critical data due to media not being in the atl at 03:00 AM, remember it will take TSM one hour for the ~insert media into the atl~ to time out, and getting up, driving in, explaining at the ~calling Jesus to the cross~ meetings about why an automated tape library requires a person to drive in at 03:00 to have a tape mounted and why the restore then failed again because the data set spanned tapes and you happened to randomly eject the 2nd tape to make room for the first so as soon as you got home you got a page to return. Now, besides doing your regular work and all the previously mentioned stuff you get to spend time figuring out which tapes, outside the atl, have now gone scratch and may be checked back in... Oh and yes, you have to figure out some way to easily generate some list of some 100 ? 200 ? 300 ? random, not in sequence, volsers to build checkin commands around... get the picture ? ? ? Shoot me now, PLEASE ! just my 2 cents worth... Dwight -Original Message- From: Farren Minns [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Wednesday, January 15, 2003 10:47 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: 3494 and tapes question. Hi TSMers I am looking at what to do in the next year or so when our tape library becomes full. Baring in mind that we don't do much in the way of restores (most backups are for DR), is it feasible to remove tapes from the library and just keep them on site in case they are requested for a restore, reclamation etc. Does anyone out there do this kind of thing and how does it work for you? Thanks all Farren Minns - John Wiley Sons Ltd
Re: 3494 and tapes question.
Hi Minns, We are currently doing that. Taking tapes out of the library and leave them onsite for restore purposes but it's a pain to place the tape back into the library to perform the restore. The data may reside on multiple tapes. Are you running reclaimation on your onsite tapes? If you are, try to run it more regularly after your maintenance but before your backup schedules. Hopefully this help Regards, Tony -Original Message- From: Farren Minns [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Wednesday, January 15, 2003 8:47 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: 3494 and tapes question. Hi TSMers I am looking at what to do in the next year or so when our tape library becomes full. Baring in mind that we don't do much in the way of restores (most backups are for DR), is it feasible to remove tapes from the library and just keep them on site in case they are requested for a restore, reclamation etc. Does anyone out there do this kind of thing and how does it work for you? Thanks all Farren Minns - John Wiley Sons Ltd
Re: 3494 and tapes question.
I would so strongly recommend that you do not remove onsite storage volumes from you library if you can help it at all. Yes it will work, but when you need to do restores, or reclaimation management becomes a full time job. When we out grew our system I had a similar situation, I ended up having to write a perl script to query the server every 5 minutes and email outstanding requests to my OPS team. Although there are ways to find out what tape one might hold a nodes data while preparing for a restore, there is no easy way to know which tape has the active data. This makes tape shuffling very probable. Simply put, if there is a way to keep it all in the robot, do so! Craig Riley The Children's Hospital in Denver UNIX / TSM Admin -Original Message- From: Farren Minns [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Wednesday, January 15, 2003 9:47 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: 3494 and tapes question. Hi TSMers I am looking at what to do in the next year or so when our tape library becomes full. Baring in mind that we don't do much in the way of restores (most backups are for DR), is it feasible to remove tapes from the library and just keep them on site in case they are requested for a restore, reclamation etc. Does anyone out there do this kind of thing and how does it work for you? Thanks all Farren Minns - John Wiley Sons Ltd DISCLAIMER: CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE: The information contained in this message is legally privileged and confidential information intended for the use of the individual or entity named above. If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient, or the employee or agent responsible to deliver it to the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any release, dissemination, distribution, or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please notify the author immediately by replying to this message and delete the original message. Thank you.
Re: 3494 and tapes question.
Hello Farren. As others have said, and I cannot agree more, yes you can do this but it gets ugly.real quick! Tape reclamation is the area which I find suffers the most, particularly for copypool reclamation. How much depends greatly on your mgmtclass parms for version limits, expiration, and of course how quickly your data changes. In one case I found out that a dozen tapes had been ejected at one of our other offices such that it was preventing offsite reclamation. Checking those tapes back in allowed 60 offsite tapes to be reclaimed and returned. YMMV. -Al Farren Minns [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent by: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [EMAIL PROTECTED] 01/15/03 10:46 AM Please respond to ADSM: Dist Stor Manager To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] cc: Subject:3494 and tapes question. Hi TSMers I am looking at what to do in the next year or so when our tape library becomes full. Baring in mind that we don't do much in the way of restores (most backups are for DR), is it feasible to remove tapes from the library and just keep them on site in case they are requested for a restore, reclamation etc. Does anyone out there do this kind of thing and how does it work for you? Thanks all Farren Minns - John Wiley Sons Ltd
