Dell DR6000 ASG-TimeNavigator - Setting Up the DR Series System as a Backup Ta - Page 53

A A.1 Best practices for setting up ASG-Time Navigator backup native Virtual Library System (VLS) on a DR Series system The DR Series systems are capable of running a cleaning cycle on a regular basis to recover data space that is no longer required by the deduplication process. Using a DR Series system as an ASG-Time Navigator VTL repository requires periodic maintenance to achieve the best usage from the system. Space reclamation from virtual media of a ASG-Time Navigator VTL hosted on a DR Series system has some specific requirements. Even though ASG-Time Navigator can locate and blank media that is marked for spare or reuse, the DR Series system will not know that ASG-Time Navigator has marked the media for spare or reuse and will not reclaim the space on the next clean cycle. This is due to the fact that ASG-Time Navigator will only update the header on the media and not scrub through and remove the old data. To ensure that the cleaner cycle can reclaim space, the marked for reuse media must be identified and cleared using the tina_libary_control . Tina_cart_control utilities must be removed and then re-added as a new file. Since the new file no longer has any content, the DR Series cleaner cycle can reclaim the space. ASG-Time Navigator nVTL setup /configuration best practice for configuring number and size of each cartridge Due to various factors such as data set size, data set iteration or count, retention period, and change rate, it can be difficult to determine the best VTL size and configuration for any given deduplication situation. One of the best practices is to • Size the VTL to no more than 10x the physical available disk space • Or to assess how much data you have to backup and the required retention periods for each set of data so as to not exceed either one of these two guidelines when creating the virtual media for the virtual tape library • And to set the drive count to equal the number of simultaneous jobs or data streams desired without exceeding the maximum guidelines set forth by the vendor. For Example: Starting with a storage appliance with 2TB of physical disk space. Based on the 10X usage recommendation, you can create a VTL of 20TB of total storage. But, given that the data backed up per week is 2TB and data retention is 4 weeks, the total amount of data stored at any given time would only be 8TB. Reducing the VTL space to 10TB would then be a more efficient use of space. Once the overall size of the VTL is determined, the number of virtual drives to create and the granularity of the VTL is the next consideration. Most storage appliance operating environments can effectively handle a set number of streams. Any read or write operation to and from a VTL virtual drive would denote a stream. As a rule of thumb, the number of virtual drives to create in the VTL should reflect what is required to support simultaneous streams, or concurrent jobs. Creating an excessive number of drives does not yield any benefits and could lead to 53 Setting Up the Dell™ DR Series System as a Backup Target on ASG-TimeNavigator | April 2015