I apologize in advance if this seems a bit scatterbrained, I'm just a bit confused... I am wondering if someone can help me understand what is going on here in our environment when it comes to our tape library.
So we have a TS3310 tape library with 4 drives and 126 tape slots (and 1 cleaning tape slot). For quite some time now, we've been limping along with this tape library running at very near full capacity, and we are constantly seeing errors about it not having enough scratch volumes. The tapes we use are all LTO5. We don't have the budget to expand the tape library, and quite frankly I'm not sure at this point that we really need to. I'd just like to find out here if we are missing something in our normal processes that would ultimately be affecting how the tapes are used.
We have a DRM plan in place and admin schedules that run various scripts to handle DB backups to disk and tape, copypool backups, expiration, migration and reclamation processes, etc. We have a report that gets generated daily which lists which tapes need to be removed from the library and placed in the vault (Mountable), and which tapes need to be brought back to the vault and checked in (VaultRetrieve). We have a person who reads the report and performs these duties on a daily basis (Mon-Fri).
On our 3 primary tape storage pools, we currently have the reclamation threshold set at 60, and the 2 copypools we have are set at 70.
We also have been seeing an issue for quite some time now where tapes that were checked out and moved to the vault are marked in the volhist file as STGDELETE at some point and are essentially orphaned. They are never marked in the system as vaultretrieve to be used as scratch again. For this, we have just been manually comparing the volhist file with the physical tapes in the vault, to see which ones we can reuse as scratch. However, with the library being near capacity, we can never catch up to what the system is needing.
So with all that said, is there any more specific info that you might need to look at in order to help me determine what is going on?
So we have a TS3310 tape library with 4 drives and 126 tape slots (and 1 cleaning tape slot). For quite some time now, we've been limping along with this tape library running at very near full capacity, and we are constantly seeing errors about it not having enough scratch volumes. The tapes we use are all LTO5. We don't have the budget to expand the tape library, and quite frankly I'm not sure at this point that we really need to. I'd just like to find out here if we are missing something in our normal processes that would ultimately be affecting how the tapes are used.
We have a DRM plan in place and admin schedules that run various scripts to handle DB backups to disk and tape, copypool backups, expiration, migration and reclamation processes, etc. We have a report that gets generated daily which lists which tapes need to be removed from the library and placed in the vault (Mountable), and which tapes need to be brought back to the vault and checked in (VaultRetrieve). We have a person who reads the report and performs these duties on a daily basis (Mon-Fri).
On our 3 primary tape storage pools, we currently have the reclamation threshold set at 60, and the 2 copypools we have are set at 70.
We also have been seeing an issue for quite some time now where tapes that were checked out and moved to the vault are marked in the volhist file as STGDELETE at some point and are essentially orphaned. They are never marked in the system as vaultretrieve to be used as scratch again. For this, we have just been manually comparing the volhist file with the physical tapes in the vault, to see which ones we can reuse as scratch. However, with the library being near capacity, we can never catch up to what the system is needing.
So with all that said, is there any more specific info that you might need to look at in order to help me determine what is going on?