VU Blog

We upgraded the backup environment to Networker 7.5 to address a variety of issues.  So far the software seems to be a decent improvement from the prior version as far as bugs and instability are concerned.  We had some minor licensing issues at first, but with the assistance of EMC we quickly remedied that problem.

Additionally, we are almost finsihed addressing the virtual drive to physical disk space problem.  Originally we had our virtual tapes configured for a capacity of 800 GB which is the native capacity for LTO-4.  Compressed this represents approximately 1.2 TB of data per virtual cartridge.  The problem was that our tapes were not expiring as often as we had hoped because of the sheer number of savesets on each volume.  I have reconfigured all of the pools but one to use 200 GB cartidges and this should correct the problem.

One more change we have made to address the amount of data on tape is to reduce our retention time on disk/onsite to one week.  Originally we retained 14 days, but this resulted in retaining 3 weeks due to the fact that a “full” backup will be kept if any incrementals dependant on that backup are not yet expired.  Lowering the retention time on standard backups (1 full, 6 incrementals) to 1 week still keeps 2 weeks worth of data and corrects the problem of keeping the third full.  All clients that backup at a “full” level every day are still set to be kept for two weeks as they are not affected by the full/incremental retention issue.

We tested backup of CO-LO customers Owen and Law over a private backend network in order to avoid a couple of firewalls.  During this test we realized a 400% improvement in performance.  This brings up the a real need for a dedicated backup network to improve performance across the environment.
We have done extensive work this month to present accurate and detailed statistics on the state of our storage environment so that the information can be used to determine how the storage environment is being used and to more accurately forecast future needs.

I wrote a script this month to analyze VUspace and determine how many users are actively using the service and how much of the data on the service is stale.