Is anyone using staging option with 11.5?

[jcon26]

Just wondering if there is a way to make Arcserve use multiple staging disks inteligently.

For example, I have 2 staging disks in a group and when the first one fills up the job fails instead of using the second disk. Any ideas?

 

[vschumpy]

I'm not sure whether it was enhanced in r11.5 or not, but the behaviour you describe is how I have seen it work in previous versions.

Because a FSD/Hard disk is treated pretty much the same as a tape media in a drive, the only way that ARCserve can span to another media is if that media was ejected from the drive and a new blank one inserted. Not that it would work in practice like that either, but that's just the concept behind how it used to work in previous versions.

The general thinking behind the automated disk staging in r11.5 is that you would dedicate quite significant amounts of disk space for staging, and there is also the option to setup automatic migration to tape once the staging groups hits a configurable target (say 80% full for example), so that the staging area shouldn't run out of disk space in the first place.

Now, if you were thinking of using a bunch of 9Gb disks you had lying about the storeroom doing nothing for example and hoping to use them like individual media (IE not RAIDed or anything), then that isn't really what disk staging is about, or how it is intended to work.

Hope this gives you a clearer idea of what you can and cannot get out of disk staging.

 

[jcon26]

Thank you for your response. As it stands we have a 2 terabyte volume and another 1 terabyte volume. I had hoped that if we ran out on the 2 it would move to the 1.

As far as the automatic migration goes it does not appear to work that way. We have a threshold (default is 80%) and when it gets to that threshold it gives a commit point reached and fails instead of starting the migration to tape. From what I understand it should continue to work and start the migration job. Is there a setting I am missing possibly? Perhaps the settings regarding how long to keep the data on the disk volume need to be changed?

Thanks for your help,
jcon

 

[vschumpy]

I believe your understanding is correct on the migration. However if all tape drives are in use or no suitable tapes are available at the time when the threshold is met then perhaps this might explain it?

I'm not sure on any additional settings, but will have a look at it later today and see if there is anything obvious.