I am not sure I follow your plan. If you have tapes in a
tape pool say "production data" and these tapes are vaulted out of your robot to
a offsite volume group say "company_offsite", these tapes should remain in the
original tape pool by design. If the tape is in the robot or out, you still want
the tapes to be grouped together with other tapes that have the same type of
data.
I wanted to, if
possible, move the tapes from their original Volume Pool to an "off site" volume
pool when the tapes were vaulted. My whole thought process behind that was
that I am managing over a thousand tapes, across 50+ media servers (with each
one having its own SDLT600 robotic library). The volume pool gets rather
cluttered with vaulted tapes, when all I wanted to look at was the tapes that
are present in the robot now. It's really more of an organizational /
house cleaning want more than it is an operational need. Besides, when a
tape is rotated back into the library the tape is erased. The only reason
a tape would be injected back into the library and not erased is in the event of
a recovery.
You could create separate vaults for each tape pool you have and
eject them out of your robot to a offsite volume group and slot number. The
problem comes in though that each offsite group has its own vault slot number
range. So if you have 1 large tape library with slots 1-10,000 and you have 5
different vaults defined and they all begin with slot one then you need to keep
them on separate tape racks. This gets very messy at first. BUT the way
vault is designed is that if you vault all tapes into the same offsite volume
group then all tapes can reside starting at slot 1 and work their way up to slot
10,000. But they are still separate in a way because the tapes still sit in
different tape pools.
We have about 5000 tapes at our one location but these tapes consist of
many types of data (exchange, production, NDMP etc). But I have one vault
defined that ejects all the tapes to the same offsite volume group starting in
slot 1. The tapes get filed away together, side by side, even though they are
from different volume pools. When these tapes go scratch they show up on my one
scratch list and they get pulled and moved to a scratch shelf then they go into
the robot. If I had separate vaults defined I would have to run many vaults each
day or week and have many different scratch reports (since the vault only prints
out the scratch list for that offsite volume group defined) to worry about each
day/week. Too much hassle.
Just be careful though in your design because vault cannot eject
different types of media in the same vault, for example if you have LTO and DLT
tapes. These need to have separate vaults for each media type or they will never
get moved to the offsite site volume group correctly. They get assigned a slot
number but never get moved to the offsite volume group and thus will not show up
on a scratch list when they go unassigned.
I'm only dealing
with DLT tapes, so that isn't an issue.
Thanks for the
reply, and the information. It was helpful.
I'm not currently
using vault, but would like to. I need to justify the cost. I'm
using / experimenting with / learning vault on our test environment with a
temp license. Currently when a tape is about to get rotated out, the tape
gets frozen. When the time comes to rotate it back in, the tape is
unfrozen and the tape is then erased. If a recovery needs to occur, the
tape that is needed is inserted back into the robot, unfrozen, data is
recovered, tape is frozen then moved back off-site. Is vault going to do
any more for me (tape rotation wise) that what I'm doing right
now?
--
Mike
From: Hindle, Greg [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Wednesday, October 11, 2006 12:29 PM
To: Sponsler, Michael; veritas-bu@mailman.eng.auburn.edu
Subject: RE: [Veritas-bu] Managing Tape Rotations
I am not sure I follow your plan. If you have tapes in a
tape pool say "production data" and these tapes are vaulted out of your robot to
a offsite volume group say "company_offsite", these tapes should remain in the
original tape pool by design. If the tape is in the robot or out, you still want
the tapes to be grouped together with other tapes that have the same type of
data.
You could create separate vaults for each tape pool
you have and eject them out of your robot to a offsite volume group and slot
number. The problem comes in though that each offsite group has its own vault
slot number range. So if you have 1 large tape library with slots 1-10,000 and
you have 5 different vaults defined and they all begin with slot one then you
need to keep them on separate tape racks. This gets very messy at first.
BUT the way vault is designed is that if you vault all tapes into the same
offsite volume group then all tapes can reside starting at slot 1 and work their
way up to slot 10,000. But they are still separate in a way because the tapes
still sit in different tape pools.
We have about 5000 tapes at our one location but these
tapes consist of many types of data (exchange, production, NDMP etc). But I have
one vault defined that ejects all the tapes to the same offsite volume group
starting in slot 1. The tapes get filed away together, side by side, even though
they are from different volume pools. When these tapes go scratch they show up
on my one scratch list and they get pulled and moved to a scratch shelf then
they go into the robot. If I had separate vaults defined I would have to run
many vaults each day or week and have many different scratch reports (since the
vault only prints out the scratch list for that offsite volume group defined) to
worry about each day/week. Too much hassle.
Just be careful though in your design because vault cannot
eject different types of media in the same vault, for example if you have LTO
and DLT tapes. These need to have separate vaults for each media type or they
will never get moved to the offsite site volume group correctly. They get
assigned a slot number but never get moved to the offsite volume group and thus
will not show up on a scratch list when they go unassigned.
Greg
Hindle
Constellation Energy
Data Management & Recovery
Room 500, 1068 N. Front
St.
Baltimore, MD 21202
410-470-1552
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Sponsler, Michael
Sent: Wednesday, October 11, 2006 11:38 AM
To: veritas-bu@mailman.eng.auburn.edu
Subject: [Veritas-bu] Managing Tape Rotations
I'm trying to work out a good tape rotation policy, and I'm trying to get vault to work the way I want it. Basically the tapes are replaced every month, and rotated back in every 6 months (they get erased when rotated back in). With Vault, I've noticed that the "vaulted" tapes remain in the same volume pool that they were assigned to but are moved to a different volume group. With out unassigning the tape, and basically losing the data on said tape, is there a way to move the tape to a different Volume Pool (not volume group) while the tape is vaulted / moved off-site? I'm dealing with hundreds of tapes, and my Volume pools are becoming cluttered with vaulted tapes.
Is there a better tape rotation system to use besides Vault, and what would any of you suggest?
--
Mike
Sponsler
Northrop Grumman
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
(703) 968-1302
12900 Federal Systems
Pkwy
Fairfax, VA 22033
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