Mapped VBK

[doggatas]

It's taking a very long time to capture a full backup to tape when a mapped VBK is the best restore point to send to tape. It's not so bad when dealing with regular backup jobs as I have parallel processing enabled but with a GFS job it only uses 1 tape drive and can take 30+ hours. I have check the boxes that prevent source jobs from interrupting the GFS tape job so no issue there. Data always growing so it's only going to get worse.

I have a Backup Copy job to disk which has a GFS schedule and retention point of just 2. -----Ignoring the GFS restore points and the vbms------ On the last day of the month (Jan 2018 for example) and after the backup copy job copies and merges the latest increment there will be 2 backup files :

1 vbk from the 30th
1 vib from the 31st (End of Month)

The next day after the job runs and merges the increment the following files are there:

1 vbk from the 31st (End of Month)
1 vib from the 1st

What I would like to happen is for the GFS Tape job to wait until last day of month backup is a full VBK. It will not have to synthesise anything and finish a lot quicker. In my scenario the current GFS schedule of running at 0:00 is useless as there is definitely not going to be any restore points from the last day of the month since the last day of the month is only seconds old. It then eventually picks up the VIBs when they're written at 10-11pm and create a synthetic mapped VBK.

edit: am I better off using file to tape in combination with a script?

edit2: I have approval for a Nimble secondary flash array as a target for our primary backup jobs. Can anyone shed some light on what speed a mapped VBK to LTO7 (fibre) can achieve on this unit. Or if there are better hardware alternatives (Netapp, EMC, etc..).


Regards

[csydas]

Hey David,

Not sure if it helps with your planning (honestly not following the set up on your Backup Copy), but the GFS Tape jobs watch for "Create Date" on the source point; we found out the hard way you have to set the GFS tape job to look on the day the job starts, not on the day the the job completes. Once you work with that, it's pretty simple to get GFS Tape to do what you want. I don't quite know what days you've got set, but this was our big issue. Point the GFS Tape job to run on the same day the Full is made and it will just fly.