Firestreamer with DPM 2010

The technical support forum for Firestreamer (the virtual tape library).
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dkenn
Posts: 1
Joined: 16 Nov 2010, 15:42

Post by dkenn »

Setting up firestreamer in DPM 2010 enviroment and need to understand how to set it up to use my existing tapes in my HP MSL6030 LIBRARY. Will dpm use my existing tapes in this enviroment?
jsf
Cristalink Support
Posts: 300
Joined: 29 Aug 2010, 09:03

Post by jsf »

My understanding is that you would like to increase the utilization of physical tape with Microsoft DPM. To my knowledge, the problem is that DPM may use different tapes for different protection groups, and may ask for a free tape before the current tapes are filled in.

Firestreamer can definitely help you with this. While it has nothing to do with physical tape, you can create intermediate backups to virtual tapes on a disk drive, and then back up the virtual tapes to physical tape. That’s what some of our customers actually do for various reasons.

In your case, for example, you configured intermediate backups to Firestreamer to D:\VirtualTapes. DPM wrote 10 virtual tapes 50 GB each. This resulted in 10 files in D:\VirtualTapes. The actual size of the files will be 500 GB or less, depending on whether you used Firestreamer compression or not. You also configured a backup of D:\VirtualTapes to physical tape. Because the latter backup belongs to one protection group, DPM is likely to put it to the same tape, so you will have all virtual tapes backed up to the same physical tape. The result is that only one physical tape is used instead of 10, assuming that a physical tape holds 500GB.
Best regards,
John Smith
Cristalink Support
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