PowerProtect Data Manager 19.12 Administration and User Guide

Mobile storage units

For Smart Scale, mobile storage units extend the concept of a storage unit to the scope of an entire system pool. A mobile storage unit has the potential to move from one pool member to another. Thus:

• When you browse the storage units in a system pool, PowerProtect Data Manager displays only mobile storage units.
• When you browse the storage units on a DD system, PowerProtect Data Manager displays only regular (non-mobile) storage units.
• You must work with mobile storage units at the system pool level.

Aside from scope differences, PowerProtect Data Manager treats mobile storage units and regular storage units as equivalent.

Storage unit creation and configuration

PowerProtect Data Manager provides two ways to create storage units on the protection storage system:

• If you do not select an existing storage unit when you create a protection policy, PowerProtect Data Manager automatically creates a storage unit for you.
• Through the PowerProtect Data Manager UI, you can directly create storage units as required.

You can use the UI to configure the quotas and credentials for storage units under the control of PowerProtect Data Manager.

Click to open the Details pane and see more information about an existing storage unit, including configuration values.

Storage unit selection

When you create or edit a protection policy, PowerProtect Data Manager provides the option to select a storage unit as the protection or replication target. The storage unit can be on the same or another protection storage system.

The Storage page lists all storage units that were discovered on a protection storage system. Only storage units under the control of PowerProtect Data Manager are available to select for a protection policy. Other storage units are not available to select, even if known.

A storage unit under the control of PowerProtect Data Manager can be the target for multiple protection policies. When you select an existing storage unit as a policy target, the policy inherits the storage unit's quota settings.

Managing Protection Policies provides more information about using storage units with policies.

Security

All protection policies and applications that share a storage unit can access any data in that storage unit. Reuse a storage unit only for policies and applications that belong to the same organizational unit or which share a trusted relationship. Policies and applications for different organizational units should use different storage units.

Any other external applications that also use the storage unit should protect and restrict access to the DD Boost credentials. These credentials provide access to the PowerProtect Data Manager data.

Automatic storage unit maintenance

For automatically-created storage units, automatic maintenance removes the storage unit when both the following conditions are true:

• No protection policies target the storage unit for backups or replication.
• The storage unit contains no backups.

Automatic maintenance removes these empty, unused storage units. For governance mode retention, automatic maintenance removes these storage units even if retention lock is enabled. Because deleting a storage unit with compliance mode enabled requires security officer credentials, automatic maintenance cannot remove these storage units.

For directly-created storage units, automatic maintenance does not remove the storage unit even when these conditions are true. In this case, contact the protection storage system administrator to remove the storage units.

Updating from previous releases

Any protection policy can use storage units that were automatically created for policies in a previous release of PowerProtect Data Manager. Policies that were created in a previous release continue to function as before.

Previous releases of the Oracle agent do not support storage units with multiple protection policies. The PowerProtect Data Manager Oracle RMAN User Guide provides more information.