Networker

Re: [Networker] False "Tape is either disabled or in service mode"

2010-09-23 09:16:36
Subject: Re: [Networker] False "Tape is either disabled or in service mode"
From: James Pratt <jpratt AT NORWICH DOT EDU>
To: NETWORKER AT LISTSERV.TEMPLE DOT EDU
Date: Thu, 23 Sep 2010 09:15:40 -0400
-----Original Message-----
From: EMC NetWorker discussion [mailto:NETWORKER AT LISTSERV.TEMPLE DOT EDU] On
Behalf Of rmumford
Sent: Thursday, September 23, 2010 9:06 AM
To: NETWORKER AT LISTSERV.TEMPLE DOT EDU
Subject: [Networker] False "Tape is either disabled or in service mode"

"I find your issue of having to relabel daily a bit odd - cant you
create 
enough vtl tapes in the lib to cover your retention policy/(s)? if you 
are on vtl, you are not using AFTD, correct? (or perhaps both?) 

what do you mean sessions are set to 1 per dd? do you mean 1 per drive 
on paralellism on every DD unit ?? - that would be correct, so you have 
to create more drives than normal to over-compensate for the lame 
parallellism setting. 

We just followed the best practice guides for nw and dd we found on 
powerlink or on datadomain.com - they have done fairly well for us 
despite some early issues/problems with licensing and stuff... sorry i 
dont have specific config details, but can have them by the am, email me

off-list if you'd like more info."

Thanks, yes thats target sessions and max sessions on each tape drive
set to 1. The DD rep was pretty adamant about that. And he's the one who
keeps telling us to relabel tapes each day to keep from filling up the
DD. And I can see some sense in doing that. (we're only a bit over 50%
though) We also are replicating some data to a remote site over a small
pipe and wanted to keep that to a minimum, but as you say I'd much
rather just create enough tapes and forget about it. Which we may do
since this is turning into a hassle.

We already have 24 drives per storage node to compensate for max
sessions = 1, that may not be enough on our situation. How many drives
can you put up on a storage node, is there a limit? 

Thanks

---

One thing I've found with the DD-techs is that they often do not know
networker very well (yet?) - Obviously, this is understandable, so
perhaps the lack of networker saveset expiration internals is why he
suggests relabeling daily, however, like you say, that is kind of silly
- you should just create enough vtl tapes to cover your retention
policy, end of story - Especially if your only at 50% of the capacity,
it should not be an issue... 

I'm not sure exactly how many drives you can do per SN, I believe it has
more to do with the licensing in networker (FOr example, we needed an
"unlimited slot autochanger" license to add 16 drives to ours).

HTH,

cheers,
james

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