AUx coopy admin jobs every 30 mins 1

[NATD]

Hi,

I noticed yesterday that my 7.0 system has got Aux copies scheduled for each of my tape copies to run every day, every 30 mins.

I don't ever recall seeing this in the past and of course. So each day i have 200 admin jobs scheduled, with what i consider my intentional ones burried inbetween.

My jobs all use a magnetic library for the primary copy, with a synchonous aux tape copy, but are these admin jobs MEANT to be there?

 

[JG5]

If you had your copies configured to automatically copy in 6.1, that's why you're seeing the admin jobs. The auto-copy feature for Storage Policy copies is now scheduled in 7.0, and the schedules were automatically created when you upgraded.

 

[NATD]

urrgg...messy.

Yes, I did have automatic copy on in 6 because I always take the backup to disk and then want a tape copy too for offsite storage. I presumed that was the normal way people achieved this!

Is having a schedule window chock full of hundreds of jobs a day now just 'normal'? It also means the job controller windows has frequent activity as these jobs kick off every 30 mins.

How come they changed it anyway? I want the old way back!

 

[JG5]

I had all of mine set to automatically copy as well - similar to your setup I backup to disk first, then spin 2 tape copies. In 6.1, it just worked and I never saw anything in the job controller window. About this time last year, 2 of my storage policy copies would pop up on the job controller window even if there was nothing to copy. Commvault could never figure that one out - no big deal, just a little annoying. As far as normal goes, I guess that depends and varies per environment, but I'm of the opinion that nothing in I.T. is "normal." It looks as though Commvault wanted to include more features in this release. I'm not sure if they simply decided to do it this way, or if a handful of customers requested it or other features - they've never listed to me as far as features go though.

 

[NATD]

Maybe I shouldn't grumble..two things I was complaining about to CV have magically appeared in 7 so maybe the changes in automatic copies is just someone else getting their wish.

My two things?

1) Not having to pay for 'unbuffered I/O'
2) Free report to tell my couriers when to bring tapes back. Not that it's ideal, but good enough is better than nothing or buying Vaulttracker Enterprise for such a basic feature!

 

[JG5]

I agree - I'm a fan of any free feature. I got all the bells and whistles when we purchased the licenses since I rely heavily upon things like Vault Tracker, Gridstor etc. One thing I've been hounding them about is the ability to manually select multiple jobs to prune at one time. I'm not sure why this would be difficult. I thought at first it may be because of such a big hit to the database, but scheduled pruning does the exact same thing, only based on date rather than a manual selection. Oh well, maybe in SP2...

 

[Cyklops]

about a free report for returning tapes: if you setup a Media Information Report to show all 'spare' tape cartridges for a specified Storage Policy and a specific outside location this should be sufficient for a courier to decide which tapes to carry am I right ??

regards

 

[JG5]

That should be fine. As long as your repositories and locations are correct, as well as the media in question being aged so that it returns to the spare pool you should have no problem.

 

[NATD]

You know, despite what I wrote above, I'm not sure the "Data retention forecast' or 'media information' still meet my needs.

What i want to do is what I used to do in ARCServe. Print a weekly report (we did it each Friday) which gets emailed to the tape people telling them what tapes to bring on each day of the following week.

That needs to predict based on what data is due to age etc which is why I thought the new report did it (it had the 'forecast x days' option) but I'm not seeing that the output correlates to what i want. That and the fact that you can't narrow it down to individual libraries so the report end up with a million entries including MagLibs.

Somone else mentioned that they have all the bells and whistles. I have a few bells and the odd whistle (ie I have gridStor and Vaulttracker (not Enterprise though) like he mentioned" but I still don't see any of the available options helping me.

Maybe this is the time to ask: Can we write custom reports?

 

[birky]

Confused here mate...I'm positive you can drill your media reports down to individual libraries..how are you configuring your reports?

I know plenty of people who use these reports for informing other sites of which tapes to put back in the library.

I'll check once I get back in front of a CommServe and get back to you.

btw. Vaultracker would only help you if you had the enterprise version because that allows you to configure 'due back' reports



Birky
CommVault Certified Engineer

 

[JG5]

Birky is right - what you need is the ability to generate due back reports which is only available with Vault Tracker Enterprise. I use it religiously.

 

[NATD]

You know what I've settled for? I've got a 'scratch media report' being emailed every monday to our tape people. We've told them to look for any media which has their company name in the 'location' field and bring them back.

So the media gets aged, returned to scratch and if it's offsite they see that on the report and bring it back.

So far, so good.