TSM: reducing retention to free capacity

[smetter]

Hello,

we have recently reduced the retention for all policy domains from
450 days to 365 days.
This was done about one week ago.
We've done this because we are running out of capacity.

However, this retention modification is not reflected in the "occupancy" table.
No drop is seen when we perform : "select sum(logical_MB) MB from occupancy."
Expiration processing is running correctly.

We are wondering how this is possible.

(the modified policy sets were all activated)

any ideas?

 

[moon-buddy]

Depends at what point in time the policy changes have been applied, as to what these retention translates to in terms of retained versions. You may have to wait for a few days, a few weeks, or a month or so to see any BIG change.

If the change was drastic - 450 days to 60 days as an example - you will see it right away.

 

[smetter]

I don't understand why it should not be immediately visible.
We have dropped down from 450 days to 365 days,
I would say this reduction is big enough.

There have to be a lot of inactive versions older than 365 days,
that TSM should have thrown out when we've modified the retentions.
But we saw no change at all in TSM manager when we generated our "total data stored" graph (which is based on table occupancy).

We have done a cleanup of old nodes a couple of days ago,
about 15 nodes that did not need to be kept anymore were deleted.
After deleting these nodes,
we immediately saw a significant drop when we performed:
"select sum(logical_MB) MB from occupancy"
-> this was reflected immediately in the occupancy table.

I don't understand why we don't notice any drop at all after modifying the retentions.

 

[domino]

run AUDit LICenses and show again

 

[hogmaster]

Hi Smetter,

It might be that you are not save that much data for verly long times , it might already have ben removed due to versions or keep extra parameter, can you put the output from q copy, below is an example.


Copy Versions Versions Retain Retain
Group Data Data Extra Only
Name Exists Deleted Versions Version

STANDARD 1 1 0 0
STANDARD 1 1 0 0
STANDARD 3 1 12 12
STANDARD 1 1 30 60
STANDARD 2 1 30 60
STANDARD 10 10 10 10
STANDARD 3,670 No Limit No Limit No Lim-
it
STANDARD 201 201 201 201

STANDARD No Limit No Limit No Limit No Lim-
it

 

[chad_small]

Do you have Oracle TDP's in use? If so are you sure the Oracle DBA's are deleting their data correctly with RMAN? Quick and easy way to free up space if it turns out they have not been expiring data correctly.

 

[smetter]

Thanks for all the replies and sorry for my late answer.

The reasons why we do not see a big drop in total data stored are:

-> We have a lot of Oracle TDP backups, and as Chad said,
the retentions also needed to be modified at RMAN level

-> and also, for the file-level backups,
it turns out that somebody had modified the retention
from 365 days to 460 days only in February 2010 somewhere
(which I did not know, I thought they had been like that for years)
So this explains why we don't see anything major when changing back to
365 days now, the retention on 460 days was not active long enough.
(like moon-buddy indicated as possible cause)

Thanks all for trying to help :up: