Adding another Tape Library

[PaulaB]

We are currently having a problem with the need for more tapes in our Library. We have a 3583 with x2 drives. I thought the solution would be to buy another library, but have found that you cannot have 2 libs connect to TSM using same stgpools. Therefore, we would have to split our backups/stgpools an option I'm not sure we should take.



We have 28nodes that run backups daily from 2am - 6am with x2 drives. The problem is too few drives/tapes to backup nodes in our small window of time.



My question is: Would having 2 libs be a suitable way of backing up??



Any help greatly appreciated...



P

 

[AndyRH]

Why would you not add more drives to the existing library? You said you have two drives and the library can have 6.



Andy

 

[PaulaB]

Thanks for your reply Andy...



This is what i have suggested to the company, but because the cost of new drives and another library is close to the same they would rather buy another library.



Paula

 

[AndyRH]

We have two libraries, the second one was bought for diaster recovery purposes, it is smaller than the primary library and located in a different building. What we do is put data with different retention in the second library since that takes a different storage pool anyway, but we make all of our Copy Pool tapes out of the larger library. This results in tapes only being ejected from one library. This method works well, but we do have more scratch tapes than if we had only one library.



Andy

 

[DennyP]

Two libs work well.

If you new lib has more drives, create a new pool and migrate current pool to it, then use new lib for backups. Migrate to secondary pool in old lib after xxx days. Also use smaller lib for copy pools.