Report Request: Tapes used per month.

[ccatlett1984]

I'd like an easy to look at report showing the number of tapes used per month, so I can forecast the number of tapes I need to purchase.

Maybe include a line chart showing the past 12 months for trending.

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Chris,

This is a good feature request. Can you please tell me a bit more about your tape backup strategy? Do you just offload tapes for archival purposes or you rotate them on some monthly/early basis?

Thanks!

[ccatlett1984]

I keep 1 year of retention for all my tapes.
With the GFS support coming in v9 I am looking to setup that and keep those for 3 years.

[Vitaliy S.]

Ok, thanks for additional info. While there is no report showing how many tapes are used per each month, we are going to have a dedicated GFS retention tape reports (in the next updates), that should allow you to estimate the number of tapes required.

[ccatlett1984]

Separate GFS reports will be great.

Does a report exist that would show me the write time of all tapes, then I can do some excel-fu to get what I need.

[Vitaliy S.]

Nikita should know more about this, as he is the author of this report.

[Shestakov]

Hi Chris,
You are correct, the reports are to give you an information about both date of the VMs restore point, when they were backed up and date when the file was written to the tape.

Thanks for the request about number of tapes used during the period.
I`ve got a question about it. You write backups on tapes with some protection period. After a while some tapes become available to rewrite. So the "tape capacity planning" essence is to show how much tapes were used and made protected, how many became available and how many clean tapes there are, to predict when you need to buy new ones. Does it sound correct?

[ccatlett1984]

I am planning on moving to lto6 this coming spring, so I am going to need to forecast my current qty of tapes used per month, to determine how many of the larger tapes I'll need to budget for.

[Shestakov]

I see your point. We will think how to make a report for that kind of demand.
By the way, the basic Tape Backups report contains the information of how much data is currently written to the tapes.
Thanks again!