File Share to Disk to Tape Compression

[iani.ianev]

I have upcoming task to implement tape archives for VM, agent and file share backups and looking for advise about the best practices about tape (hardware) compression.

While its all clear with the VM and agent backups the best practice is the hardware compression should not be used in case they are already compressed and it could cause even worse results I can't see anything about File Share tape archives (as a secondary copy from backup to disk) which should be stored in native (files/dirs) format over the tapes ... Therefore (probably) the tape hardware compression should be beneficial for a serious amount of terabytes of file shares stored over the tapes.

The 3 types (VM, Agent and File Share) are obviously supported for one single tape job except the support for GFS tape pool which is OK for me (I don't like personally the tape GFS pools retention settings anyway )

I wonder -
Should I split or combine all the (VM, agent and file share) archives to one tape pool and jobs selections? Having all on one job will bring lesser management overhead, smaller tape fragmentation therefore lesser wasted tape count and space. On the other hand (probably - I can't find information anywhere) there might be a hardware compression conflict with worse performance and bigger footprint for the already compressed VM and agent backups versus the (probably) well accepted with tape hardware compression file share backups...

Any advise will be highly appreciated.

Thanks
Regards,
Iani

[Dima P.]

Hello Iani,

While its all clear with the VM and agent backups the best practice is the hardware compression should not be used in case they are already compressed

It's not absolutely correct. You can have both options enabled but you wont see real impact from both options, just one will take effect on the storage consumption while other will do nothing.

Should I split or combine all the (VM, agent and file share) archives to one tape pool and jobs selections? Having all on one job will bring lesser management overhead, smaller tape fragmentation therefore lesser wasted tape count and space.

My personal favor goes to storing all the data needed within the same media pool. It will just make it easier from restore operation perspective to grab a single media set that contains everything need. Due to compliance reasons, of course, you may need to split based on workload types or by data criticality.

there might be a hardware compression conflict with worse performance and bigger footprint for the already compressed VM and agent backups versus the (probably) well accepted with tape hardware compression file share backups...

Hardware compression is inline while data is written to tape, so there should be no conflicts during write or read operations.

Thanks!

[iani.ianev]

Hi Dima,

Thank you so much for the advises
They seem as "win-win" approach for me

Best regards,
Iani