That's interesting... what kind of tape drives?
We have two DLT libraries: An ATL P3000 and AN HP 20/700 (rebadged STK
L700). The ATL has rather slow robotics, but is very reliable. The HP has
somewhat faster robotics, but for some reason takes much longer to label
new tapes.
I think the major bottleneck is the tapes... DLTs take a long time to
mount... at least 90 seconds, usually more like 2 minutes. If you are
appending to the end of the tape, even longer... and that does not
necessarily correspond to percentage full, because DLT is serpentine; it
writes to the end of tape, then back to the front several times.
So if you need, say, two dozen tape mounts for a restore (which is not
uncommon), that could easily add an hour to the restore time.
Robin Sharpe
Berlex Labs
"Prather, Wanda"
<Wanda.Prather@J
HUAPL.EDU> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
cc: (bcc: Robin Sharpe/WA/USR/SHG)
12/17/01 11:18 Subject:
AM Re: Incremental forever -- any problems?
Please respond
to "ADSM: Dist
Stor Manager"
We have the opposite situation - we have fast robotics and use collocation.
With collocation on fast tape, it doesn't matter whether you are doing 2
weeks or 2 years of data, a restore takes the same amount of time.
Doing periodic fulls doesn't "refresh" anything, from TSM's point of view -
the original backups are still in the TSM DB and still available, even if
they are 5 years old. If you do periodic fulls, you have to retransmit
everything over the network again, and you have to adjust your policies to
make sure you allow those redundant versions to be kept; you increase the
size of your DB and the amount of reclaims you have to do.
Doing periodic "fulls" would do nothing whatever for us, except bog down
the
network.
I suggest you try doing a large restore to test your own capabilities. If
you can't restore in a timely fashion, FIRST figure out what your
bottleneck
is before you decide to "fix" it by doing full backups.
Then if you find out you still can't do restores in a timely fashion, at
least check out the use of BACKUPSETS. They give you all the client's
active data on one tape, without retransmitting all the data, and without
creating an extra zillion entries in your DB.
