Recyclables Tapes and Data Domain VTL

Hi ShivaKiran,

Thanks for the respons, i agree with this but it's always a manual intervention, i want to have a process that will do it automatically, without intervention.

Regards

Hi Patrice,

Normally Netwoker follows the following volume selection:

• Any mounted tape of the same pool with room for backup
• Appendable tape in the same pool and/or blank labeled tape in the same pool
• A full and recyclable tape in the same pool
• A full and recyclable tape from other pool, if "recycle from other pools" is set
• With Auto Media Management (AMM) enabled a blank unlabeled tape

So you can mark the appendable volumes are read-only which will next consider the recyclable tapes when auto media management is enabled.

Thanks

ShivaKiran

Hi Patrice,

With Netorker, you can only use recycleable tapes when the appendable tapes are marked read only.

Since you want the automated process of picking up recycleable tapes, you make have to use your own script

• To mark the appendable tapes as read-only

or

• script to use only recycleable tapes and ignore appendable tapes

Thanks

ShivaKiran

Mores wrote: Thanks for the respons, i agree with this but it's always a manual intervention, i want to have a process that will do it automatically, without intervention.

It is automatic, but the problem you have is that you created bunch of appendable tapes which will get used first.  So, instead do calclulation on how many tapes you need based on data so far and have those in rotation plus some overhead. Popular method in the past was to label all tapes to scratch pool, recycle them and set property of that pool to recycle to other pools while production pools could recycle from scratch pool.  I believe that method was popular due to NetBackup and their scratch pool vision. Anyway, calculate how many tapes you need per pool and remove extra appendables and you should be ok.  If you NW to take unknown tapes if it needs extra, use either scratch approach or AMM which will automatically use unknown tape (I do not consider that safe so I won't suggest that as an option).

Patrice

Firstly, you seem to have a misconception about appendable and recyclable tapes:

• an appendable tape is a tape which can be written to but is not yet marked as full.
• a recyclable tape is one which all savesets on have been marked as recyclable and thus elgible for reuse.

When you relabel a tape it becomes appendable so it simply becomes part of the pool of appendable tapes you have to work from; one implication of this is that the data on those tapes can no longer be restored; that should not be an issue as it has gone out of its retention period but there is always a possibility one day it will be useful.  One more point, you are in a worse situation with a VTL by having lots of appendable tapes because this may cause virtual media to be used over a longer period of time and thus take longer to expire, meaning you have more dead space and thus fill up your VTL faster.

Regards

David

Hello,

Thank you all for your answers, i will reduce at the maixum the appendable and do a script to relabel the recycle tape automatically.

Regards.

Patrice