How often do you buy tapes

[mosiac]

If you haven't gathered from my other threads so far I'm still pretty new to TSM but I'm trying to really get my head around everything.

I'm wondering how much data people have on average and how often they are buying tapes?

I feel like I'm ordering way too many tapes compared to how much data I have.

We purchase tapes on a fairly regular basis maybe 20 or so a month and some of those reasons I'm trying to solve and hopefully lower the amount of tapes puchased for archival but are any of you buying tapes that frequently and why?

Thanks,

 

[rallingham]

There are many things you will have to check. For example compare your DRM volumes with the volumes that have a status of Vault. If you do not keep on top of it tapes sometimes seem to become orphaned. You will have to check tapes that are offsite and be sure that they belong to a storage pool and query the contents.
I had a customer that chronically ran out of tapes and one day we had them bring the volumes back after a DR and they compared them to what should be offsite and onsite. They ended up finding about 100 volumes that were in limbo. It is a tedious process to do the compares but that is the only way I know of to find volumes.
Also make sure that expire inventory runs regularly and that offsite reclamation is running.
The other aspect is to look at your management classes to see what type of retention you have. I had anther customer that keep everything with a NOLIMIT and other data for 7 years. They also complained about buy volumes.

 

[mosiac]

I'll take a look. I think a large part of our tape eating is generating backupsets weekly of every node in our environment when I'm not sure if that's truly needed. Also I'm almost positive I have some limbo tapes in my copy pool as well in DRM sets.

Thanks for the ideas.

 

[moon-buddy]

rallingham is right

In a previous job, I had inherited a TSM environment that was poorly maintained and that they regularly order about 50 tapes a month.

After weeks on the job, I looked at the issue and found out why. It led to a recovery of 730 tapes! Yes, 730 tapes. All good, and some even almost new.

Be careful and watch your DRM tapes carefully.

 

[mosiac]

I know my TSM environment has been poorly maintained as the administrator before me believed in a "leave it alone since it's working mentality" we have 1 policy domain for 100ish nodes, that really don't need to have their data all handled the same way. But since the system grew and he didn't like change he just kept it the same but we're at the point now where we run a full backupset of all notes (split into different groups btw so that if one fails the others won't) that happens starting Friday and ending Monday. The admin basically couldn't let maintenance run daily or even weekly because of how much time is spent backing up data (incorrectly I believe) and costing us around 200k a year in tape purchases. I'd love to fix it but starting has been a pain.

 

[mosiac]

Is there a best way to check DRM Volumes vs all volumes marked as Vault? One of the ways we do it is search backupsets by all listed entries and then delete the ones that are over a year old. This seems less than efficient.

 

[moon-buddy]

Unfortunately, a 'q drm' may only show what the system has returned during defined period. The best way to check which tapes are 'orphaned' is to do a physical inventory of the tapes VS the listing created by 'q drm'. For discrepancies, q each 'orphaned' tape to determine if these hold data or belong to any storage pool.

 

[mosiac]

That was my exact plan for tomorrow morning

 

[fadzlirot]

Hi, I just signed up today and been into TSM for only a month. What does "orphaned tape" actually means for i am trying to understand the discussion here

 

[mosiac]

We were discussing tapes that get lost during different parts of different jobs and without proper marking and tracking they can end up where they don't need to be. The copy pool is a really great example of this. If you are running proper reclamation to clean up tapes that don't have a lot of files on them when you run jobs like vault retrieve you can sometimes miss tapes and then when you run inventory you find them again.