Arcserve 11.5 - how many FSD's ?

[doublej2]

Hi,
I am setting up 6 backup jobs (1 job for Exchange, 1 job for SQL dumps, 1 job for File Servers, 1 for a Peoplesoft DB, 1 for Small servers and 1 for backup of other servers) using GFS differential. I will be keeping the weekly full backups on disk for 13 days and the differential backups (mon-thu)for 6 days per job. Would I create 6 groups (1 for each job) ? and how many FSD's would I need for each group ? (would I create a FSD for each day ?)
Any help would be appreciated as I can't seem to find this info anywhere.

thanks,

 

[davidmichel]

You can create different groups or use only one either way works, but that is a lot of jobs. Perhaps some of those targets can be combined, especially if tapes will not get filled.

1 FSD = 1 tape, so for example if 25 tapes are needed for one job a total of 150 FSDs will be needed.

 

[doublej2]

Hi, Thanks David for your reply.
I talked to CA and they said you can only have one FSD per group, as, when I setup more than one FSD in a group it would only write to one and not span over to the others. I told CA that this is a limitation of the product as to me the definition of group is more than one !
I setup an FSD of 30TB and that should be fine for the data we want to keep. The reason I setup that many jobs was the client had over 150 jobs, one per server, so I wanted to minimise the amount of jobs and as each job can only do 32 streams to disk at once this will enable more streams to be written simultaneously to the FSD.

 

[eclidad]

I agree that it's a limitation that you can't span from one FSD to another. We won't have a problem for a while but will hit a limit soon. In our current setup we have 4 FSDs in one group for the dailies, 1 FSD in another group for weekly and 1 in another group for the monthly. The biggest annoyance is needing to swap them in and out. We need to stop the tape engine, swap the disk, and start the tape engine.

This daily group has more than 1 FSD. We only need 1 per day. Our drives are 500G and on a busy day we'll backup 30G. Each FSD is setup as a separate directory on the same drive.

 

[doublej2]

Hi eclidad, how do you get your jobs to write to more than one FSD if they are in the same group ?
Why not setup one FSD as the same directory on the drive, this will save you having to swap them out.

 

[eclidad]

Here's what we do. Any single run of a backup only writes a single FSD. Some of my groups have more than one FSD.

Configure -> windows server -> FSD
Create H:\A H:\B H:\C H:\D
I:\FULL
J:\MONTHLY
Configure -> Device Groups -> Default Server
-> Configure Groups
Move FSDs from H: ==> Group0, I: ==> Group1
J: ==> Group2

The annoyance with this is that the directories and drives need to be in the system when you set this up. It would be nice to be able to say "These will exists when the backup runs." What we when we tweak this list is load up a USB hub with flash drives. The software is happy when it see a drive
with the letter you will be using.

We swap disks on a weekly basis. We've got USB enclosures and 1 disk holds a daily drive for Mon - Thu, the other a drive for a full on Friday. At the end of the month we slap in another USB drive for a monthly. It's a GFS rotation but each of the daily, weekly, monthly is a separate job.

 

[doublej2]

Do you have a separate job for each day to tell it to go to different FSD's ie, a Job to go to H:\A and the other days to go to H:\B, H:\C and H:\D ? or does it just append to H:\A ? do all of the FSD's in Group0 get used ?

 

[eclidad]

No, there is one job for Monday - Thursday. They all use group0. All 3 groups are in the same media pool. On any given day it could use any of the directories. They get moved from the Saved set to the Scratch set and then overwritten. The system manages all this for you.

We've got 5 disks that we use. (It should be 6) Dec 31, 2007 will use disk #5. On Jan 2, 2007 - the first week in January, we will put in Disk #1. You can maintain this however you want. Since we can swap disks before all 4 FSD are used we didn't name our directories Mon, Tue, Wed, Thur. In the ideal world that would work but in the real world it gets messed up and stays that way.