Centera DR Drill

Question

I have a pair of Centera Gen4LP setup. The setup is running Unidirectional replication from Production to DR site. Both cluster is running GE.

The application pool is setup to default retention period of 100 years.

The challenge is customer would like to perform DR drill using the DR centera but after the drill they would like to purge out those "data" generated during the DR drill.

Few options come into my mind here

1. Customer can either change the default retention period of the pool on the DR cluster from 100 years to 1 hour. The previous production data that is already in the pool will not be affected by this retention change. After the retention period change, customer can start to write test data to DR cluster since the retention is set to 1 hour, they can perform the deletion at the later stage. The problem I am facing here is I am not sure whether the default retention period can only be updated on DR cluster alone or should I perform this for both. I will prefer to only change the default retention period in DR cluster only just for DR test purpose.

2. Customer application is using Centera SDK, they have not set any retention from the application layer so the clip when it come to the pool will use our default pool retention of 100 years. I am not sure whether the Centera SDK API can set some application retention to those test data during the DR drill period so that it can be purge out at the later stage.

3. Another question from customer point of view, they want to know whether specific clips are deleted or still existed in the cluster. What is the easier way? Are they able to do "show loc clip" in the customer version of centera viewer?

kim_marivoet · Answer

1. If you are running in GE mode, you can use privileged delete to overrule the retention period. It' a different API call (FPClip.AuditedDelete), so it depends on your ablity to use this different API call.

2. When you specify a retention period using the Centera SDK, this will overrule the default retention period, so you could write the test data with a shorter retention period.

3. I think that that command is available in the customer version (it's in the online help anyway). Otherwise you can also write a simple command line tool using the SDK that does a clip-exists check at clip level. A third option could be to use DobiMiner, a product build by my company (http://www.datadobi.com/products/retention), that can give you a detailed list of clips that are deleted, that are still under retention, etc.).

regards,

Kim Marivoet

mckeown_paul · Answer

3. You can download the tool jcasscript.jar from the utilities section of this forum which would allow you to a) perform a clip exists on the content address to see if the clips still exists or b) query for the content addresses on the cluster written/deleted  between a start/end time and compare that to your clip list

Centera

Centera DR Drill

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