My reasons for posting this are to stimulate some comments from other's
about NW7.0 and it's new features. If you aren't interested in NW7, stop
here.
I adopted NW7 for Tru64 last month, and after the initial glow has worn off,
here is what I find.
First a few stats:
I use Adv_File staging on the server. My current staging drive is 300GB.
My jukebox is 140GB and it only copys at 1MB/sec. My daily backups are
about 50GB.
One problem I had with staging previously is fixed. If the system is
staging to my jukebox, my backups still run. Successfully. Big Improvement
here.
Now to the down side.
1. NW7 can now stage, and backup at the same time, but it can not stage and
clone at the same time. When my backups finish, the automatic cloneing waits
for the staging to finish. Since this may take up to a day on my jukebox,
the clone doesn't start until the stageing is done. When the clone isn't
done in a timely manner, it SEVERLY limits the functionality of the backups
+ staging improvement.
2. Automatic staging creates a list of files to stage, and then stages them
ALL at once. After staging ALL the files to tape, it then deletes ALL the
files at the same time. Sounds logical right? True, but not very
functional. I was using a script previously (on 6.1.1) that staged files
ONE by ONE to tape, and then deleted the files ONE by ONE from the file
device. This was much superior to the ALL at once way. What I find is if
my jukebox is full (like over a long weekend,) and the file device gets
full, when I put in new tapes after the weekend, the staging will stage ALL
the files at once. In my case that can be 200GB, and it takes 36 hours to
stage all the files. This causes the automatic cloneing to fail since the
next backup started before the file device was freed up. It also caused
concern on my part because I only had 20GB of space left for the nightly
50GB backup. Even though 175GB had been staged to tape, I could not free up
the space for the next nightly backup. I was forced to kill the staging
process, and manually start the "recover space" process to get enough room
to do the nightly backup.
The Wish List:
It should be a relatively simple programing change for legato to change the
staging process from an ALL (save sets) at once process to a ONE (save set)
at a time process. I was able to accomplish this feat with a simple script
on NW6.1.1.
My first script ran just like NW7.0's does. It created a giant file of
SSID/CLONEID's, and passed this to a single nsrstage command with the same
problems I have with NW7.0 now.
My second script was much better. It simple used AWK to run the nsrstage
command once with a single ssid/cloneid number as input. Once the nsrstage
command finished the single save set, it deleted the save set file from the
file device, and then AWK would run the next nsrstage command. This allowed
the gradual reduction in size of the files stored on the file devices, and
it allowed backups, and clones to run (though it had to wait until after the
current nsrstage command finished). It was kludgy, and temperamental, but
it worked.
What do you think? Comments everyone?
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