I am taking over for the admin who is on sick leave. He will be back in a few months and in his absence we received a new tape library; an HP Ultrium 6000 24 Slot Tape Library with two tape drives that support 400GB (800GB Compressed) using Veritas v9.0 Build 4454 using remote agents.
What I need is a recommendation on how to take full advantage of the device and automate the process as much as possible. I would prefer not to baby-sit the backup’s and would like to just remove a few tapes at the end of the week and end of month.
Last week I set up the library to do two simultaneous full backups every night of 18 servers. I have partitioned the slots in the library and used the “network” feature to assign different NIC’s to each back up job beginning at 5pm (Monday – Friday). The servers are either Server 2003 or 2000. We have one Quantum SNAP Appliance (NAS) and I removed the check mark from “Enable NT SMB’s”.
Tape 1 is backing up 262GB (average) at 380MB/min in just under 14hrs. Tape 2 is backing up 329GB (average) at 540mb/m in just over11hrs. I have seen speeds in excess of 600mb/m on both of these drives while watching it’s progress; however the numbers listed above are the ones listed in the logs.
These are full backups each night and I remove the two tapes each morning and replace them with another pair. The jobs overwrite the existing data on the tapes so I am using the “son” method of backup.
The library is solely for off site end of month permanent storage in our safe; we don’t need to rely on these tapes for disaster recovery. For this we use Double-Take which copies the data on these servers bit-by-bit to our disaster recovery site over a T1 and we are using MS’s Shadow Copy feature for immediate file restoration on the Servers.
What I would like to have is a more automated method of backing up the data with a longer timeframe for off site storage. I was considering keeping the unit partitioned and loading it up with the tapes and use a Grandfather/Father/Son method as recommended in the Veritas Help Section. M-F diff backups, Friday gets a full and tape is taken off site. End of month tape goes offsite and the Friday’s are recycled.
My questions pertain to this idea and if it’s feasible, reliable, recommended. Would you recommend this backup procedure or do you have another idea. I am hoping someone out there has a similar setup and would be able to advise me.
Thanks in advance for your information and comments.
What I need is a recommendation on how to take full advantage of the device and automate the process as much as possible. I would prefer not to baby-sit the backup’s and would like to just remove a few tapes at the end of the week and end of month.
Last week I set up the library to do two simultaneous full backups every night of 18 servers. I have partitioned the slots in the library and used the “network” feature to assign different NIC’s to each back up job beginning at 5pm (Monday – Friday). The servers are either Server 2003 or 2000. We have one Quantum SNAP Appliance (NAS) and I removed the check mark from “Enable NT SMB’s”.
Tape 1 is backing up 262GB (average) at 380MB/min in just under 14hrs. Tape 2 is backing up 329GB (average) at 540mb/m in just over11hrs. I have seen speeds in excess of 600mb/m on both of these drives while watching it’s progress; however the numbers listed above are the ones listed in the logs.
These are full backups each night and I remove the two tapes each morning and replace them with another pair. The jobs overwrite the existing data on the tapes so I am using the “son” method of backup.
The library is solely for off site end of month permanent storage in our safe; we don’t need to rely on these tapes for disaster recovery. For this we use Double-Take which copies the data on these servers bit-by-bit to our disaster recovery site over a T1 and we are using MS’s Shadow Copy feature for immediate file restoration on the Servers.
What I would like to have is a more automated method of backing up the data with a longer timeframe for off site storage. I was considering keeping the unit partitioned and loading it up with the tapes and use a Grandfather/Father/Son method as recommended in the Veritas Help Section. M-F diff backups, Friday gets a full and tape is taken off site. End of month tape goes offsite and the Friday’s are recycled.
My questions pertain to this idea and if it’s feasible, reliable, recommended. Would you recommend this backup procedure or do you have another idea. I am hoping someone out there has a similar setup and would be able to advise me.
Thanks in advance for your information and comments.