Hello

I'm also tasked with coming up with a reasonable offsite storage plan.   My
first step is to reduce the need for tape duplication as much as possible.
This can be done on two fronts:
     - negotiate with management to not have complete duplication whenever
possible i.e.: allow for coarser intervals
     - Develop overlapping incrementals to alternating pools (often referred to
as Towers of Hanoi algorithm).

So far, what I have is the following plan:

Two Scalar 1000's, two media servers, one master server.   One of the Scalar
1000's is offsite but well connected via gigabit ethernet or some other high
bandwidth pipe.  Note the plan backs up multiple sites in a given WAN, all well
connected so this is not a difficult configuration to achieve.

Obviously, there are two volume groups, one for each tape library but over the
entire cluster the following volume pools exist:
     - scratch
     - netbackup (not used)
     - Hold (temporary hold pool for manual use)
     - Alpha (kept in volume group 1)
     - Beta (kept in volume group 2)
     - Archive

I plan to divide backup clients into two classes.  Class red and class blue.
Additional pairs of red and blue classes will be established for specific
clients that require specific file exclusions and or start and end scripts.
The difference between the red and blue classes is that when class red is
backing to pool alpha, class blue will be backing to pool beta and vice versa.
The backup schedule would be something like the following for class red:
     day 1     full backup to pool alpha
          duplicate full backup to pool beta
     day 2     differential backup to pool beta
     day 3     cumulative backup to pool alpha
     day 4     differential backup to pool alpha
     day 5     cumulative backup to pool beta

This results in a five day schedule with full backups happening over the weekend
window.   Any given file revision will exist in both tape libraries after a two
day period.  The loss of one complete tape library only means a loss in
resolution to specific dates i.e.: it would be as if backups were being run
every other day instead of every day.   Likewise any single tape loss will not
affect the ability to restore specific file revisions provided that the revision
existed for a two working day period.

I'm trying to estimate the tape requirements if I extend this weekly schedule to
a monthly schedule thereby reducing the frequency of the full backups to a
monthly event which can be load shared over several weekends thereby allowing
greater scalability.   Note extending  the cycle of full backups would require
extending the retention time in order to provide sufficient safeguards against
data loss since Netbackup does not have conditional expirations, however this
isn't bad, a monthly full with three months retention is less tape than weekly
fulls with a month's retention, question is does the increase in cumulative tape
requirements offset this gain?

Initially, I'll only have one tape library and will have both alpha and beta
pools in one volume group so at some point I'll have to figure out how to
transfer pools from one group to another but first things first.   Hey, it's job
security.

Note it would be possible to every other day, suspend and eject tapes in the
beta pool for offsite storage and you could script this with the command
vmchange.

Regards,
John I Wang
Sr. Systems Engineer
Steverson Information Professionals

---
Enron Broadband Services
Enron Building 1472c
ph (713) 345-4291
fax (713) 646-8063


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  |                                                                            |
  |       To:     veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu                      
      |
  |       cc:     twarnock AT rbmg DOT com, JPJones AT rbmg DOT com, (bcc: John 
             |
  |       Wang/Contractor/Enron Communications)                                |
  |       Subject:     [Veritas-bu] Offsite Storage                            |
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        I am a new Netbackup administrator and I have a couple of questions
about tape management. My company has implemented Netbackup in the Unix and NT
environment. They have asked me to make sure that each nights backups are
available to send offsite and that we keep a local copy for onsite restores. I
do not have the available backup window to run separate jobs for onsite and
offsite storage so I am thinking I must use the tape duplication feature. My
problem is that duping the many tapes we have each day is a very time consuming
task, there has to be a better way! Can anyone steer me in the right direction?
Is there some way to automate this task? Is this what I should be doing at all?
Thanks for your help.