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Go to SolutionNeed help understanding NetWorker and DL3D 1500 De-dupe
I am running NetWorker 7.5.1 and backup up to a DL3D 1500 VTL w/de-dupe. My goal is to keep 6 months of backups online for easy recovery and we just upgraded the capacity of DL3D to acheive this goal. However, what I'm not understanding, is this, even though the DL3D can hold 6 months worth of data, NetWorker won't be able to correct? We have the NetWorker Fast Start license which gives us a max of 40 tape slots. I currently have all 40 created as LTO-2 300GB tapes, I have them set to two different pools with different retention periods. A daily pool (11 tapes) for the information that can be rewritten every night (SQL stuff) and a 6 month pool (29 tapes) for our other data (AutoCad drawings, other stuff). After two weeks of backups, I only have a little more than half of the tapes free. Am I going to run out of space before the end of the 6 months? There is something about this whole process that I'm not understanding.
NetWorkerPM,
Thanks for you reply. I think I need to make a correction to my original post. I only have 10 slots out of the 40 possible created. I have 40 virtual tapes created. Am I able to create an unlimited amount of virtual tapes? If that is the case, I guess that is what I will need to do right? Just keep creating virtual tapes with the free space that is created after de-dupe?
Thanks,
Jason
NetWorkerPM1
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Posted November 4th, 2009 15:00
Hey Jason - The Fast Start license is only going to allow you to create/manage 40 cartridges. (NW knows that a library can't hold more tapes than available slots) But I'm pretty sure that the 40 cartridges essentially have unlimited capacity. You and I know that an LTO-2 cartridge, for example, can store 200GB or so. But in the virutal world, I believe you can keep mounting and appending to those cartridges. Neither NW nor the DL3D will stop at 200GB. BTW, please verify this with your local DL3D expert.
The problem will be expiring data older than 6 months data from logical cartridges that also contain your most recent backups. So even if you reuse those 40 cartridges to store TB's of data, at some point the DL3D is going to tell you to delete the old data and I think that becomes a non-trivial mgmt challenge.
Understand?
NetWorkerPM1
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Posted November 4th, 2009 11:00
Jason - I'm a product manager and I'm not a technical expert but I can give you enough guidance to know which set of questions you should ask next. There are a couple of approaches you can take.
1) Increase the slot count beyond the standard Fast Start capabilities. I have a specific option for DL3D that can get you unlimited slots. It isn't free, but it's the easiest solution to yoru problem. Contact sales for more info.
2) I believe since the cartrdiges are virtual, there's no end of tape that is associated with a physical cartridge. Of course if you continue to add data to a logical catridge you will end up with expiration issues and backup/recovery conflicts. This option requires more management.
3) 'Export' the cartridges and create new logical cartridges. This means of course that you have to spin the data off to a physical tape. This is probably the least desireable of options, but provides ohysical relief. Keep in mind as the data ages towards your 6 month maximum, the probability of needing to recover diminshes. At 7 months you can simply cycle the tape. Not desired, just remember that it is an option for you.
Best regards,
NetWorkerPM