How to go about setting up Offsite Tape Backup

Hi All,

I am new to Networker and its been many years since I touched any backup products.

Basically, I have a question about how easy or hard is it to introduce offsite tape rotation so we have a complete set of backups offsite for DR puposes. I have heard it is diffcult so would like your opinons please.

I guess it’s not as simple as the old days when we just take last night backup offsite since there is tape library with a 100 tapes involved? J

Current Setup

· Storagetek SL500 – 1 x Base unit + 2 x CEM or DEM modules (contains 4 x LTO 2 drives and 100 x tapes)

· Using Legato Networker 7.x

· I think on 30 day backup cycle – backing up approx 45TB with over 40 schedules.

· Currently tapes are never taken out.

· We want to introduce offsite tape backup rotation (basically so we have a complete set of backup tapes in safe in case of DR).

Question

Quick win - How difficult or easy is it to get a full backup set out so we can put into a safe – clone option of all existing tapes? Would take a long time to do for 100 tapes? and if all the tape slots are full it sounds difficult having to swap existing tapes with new ones for the cloning..?

Long term – How difficult is it to introduce a system to rotate tapes out of the library for offsite storage? E.g. a number of tapes are ejected out daily from library and taken offsite and old ones put back in?

Thanks in advance

ECL

Responses(19)
Solutions(0)

E

elitec8888

11 Posts

0

December 19th, 2012 15:00

Hi thanks for the reply, thats very useful advice.

Yes, the rotation works and you are correct that we are on the edge with capacity. The urgent requirement now is to get tape backup sets offsite but I am being told getting the tapes offsite is difficult as all the tapes are in use and no free slots to put in new blank tapes to clone .....etc

We are planning to implement a large DataDomain but that will be months away hence need a fast solution now to get "Tapes Offsite". Also even with the datadomain will are not allowed to replicate the data offsite so may still need to use tape to get our backups offsite.

Have you heard of a product called EMC AlphaStor? was wondering if that will solve the problem so we can get tapes offsite?

ble1

6 Operator

•

14.4K Posts

•

56.2K Points

1

December 20th, 2012 04:00

Alphastor is now free and used for library virtualization and media management. It is not something that you would need really with SL500 as it would add extra complexity without much of benefit to your situation. Instead, I doubt all tapes are in use all the time - that's simply not possible. Backup team should simply export full tapes (as they are not used) and keep them somewhere close in case of restore. Of course, fact that someone will have to go there and put tapes our or in might not be their cup of tea, but come on - you have situation and you deal with it. Later on you will get new box and your troubles will be behind you.

cmartinjr

40 Posts

0

December 20th, 2012 07:00

When we installed alphastor back in '08 it was more of a hassle than the benefit it provided. Keep in mind, I'm talking back in 2008 when I state the following:

1)You had to create a schedule of when tapes would be exported from the library that were in a particular pool, it didn't matter if the tape was full or not, it was ejected. To us since we sent tapes offsite we would have wasted space on some tapes.

2) You had to deposit tapes in both networker and alphastor, that in itself was a pain if we had a crapload of tapes.

3) Not very many emc support techs understood alphastor, whenever i'd open a ticket, it would always have to go to their "alphastor guy". Needless to say I ended up waiting a long time if he was busy.

We finally ended up scrapping alphastor and I wrote an eject script (which was what I posted a few posts back). Keep in mind, this was back in 2008 so all of my points above may be null and void now with the current alphastor. I'm not trying to bash alphastor, just letting you know of the challenges we ran into.

Here's the code I used to see which tapes were scratch and could be put back in the library.(again, you need to know the media pool name and the library address):

mminfo -a -r "volume,location,pool,volretent" |grep MediaPoolName | grep "expired" |grep -v LibraryAddress

If you have auto media management turned on and the "recycle to other pools" and "recycle from other pools" turned on on the media pool under "configuration,volume operations" networker will automatically grab the scratch tapes if you have multiple pools that are used in the library.

BTW, when you go to data domain you're going to love it, it makes things sooooo much easier....