VU Blog

This month we made a decision on a new tape library and have purchased it.  The new library is a Quantum I2k and should be here within a week.  In preparation for the arrival of the new hardware we have arranged installs of new HBA’s in our existing storage nodes and developed a strategy as to how the new device will be attached to our environment.  The addition of the new library to our backup environment will complete the life cycle replacement of our Sun STK L700 as well as give us a lot of additional capacity in our backup environment.  The main concern will be cloning speed and this should be greatly enhanced as well.  The addition of a VTL or similar technology will most likely be necessary to fully keep up with our cloning operations.

I have authored another Perl script which will keep track of all of our backup clients and act as the definitive list for clients configured in our backup environment.  This script launches every night at midnight and creates a master list of clients used for reporting purposes.  A second Perl script uses this master file to create three seperate lists used for cloning.  Cloning is now accomplished one third of our environment at a time over the course of a month.  I will most likely attempt to do the entire environment in a single week once the new library is in place.

Other than that it’s been a lot of operational work over this month.