VTL
This month the storage team has been working with EMC on deploying a disk back end evaulation Virtual Tape Library solution. We worked with EMC for three days to get the initial installation complete. EMC is on site Tuesday and Wednesday next week to finish the configuration. Once this is complete we will begin a one month evaluation to ensure that this product will perform as needed in out environment. This will entail reconfiguring the backup server running networker to use the new VTL that we will present from the EMC evaluation unit. We are looking at creating four Virtual Tape Libraries (one for each Legato Networker storage node) with 12 virtual tape drives. This should substantially increase our throughput for backup clients, which in turn should give us the capability to do more work in less time.
Backup Activity Reporting
I have completed phase I of a custom application that will report statistics about what files we are backing up. This visibility will provide the capability to begin taking steps to managing the data that we backup, which in turn can effect the amount of data we have stored for Vanderbilt University. For instance, there are some servers we have already seen that have extremely large files like database backups and keep rotatations of these backups for weeks on end. If we could identify a smaller number of these backups (say one week as opposed to four) we could decrease the time needed to complete our daily backups, as well as ensure we have capacity for upcoming projects, as opposed to having to purchase more storage.