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16 DR Series Appliance Cleaner Best Practices
B How to run the cleaner
There are multiple ways in which the cleaner process is run:
 Scheduled – The cleaner is triggered to begin processing and continues until the cleaning work
has been completed or the scheduled window ends. If cleaning has completed within the
scheduled window, it will not start again until the next scheduled window. For large cleaning jobs,
the cleaner will span multiple schedule windows picking up where it left off until the cleaning job
has completed. Note: The cleaner job does not pause except in-between cleaning schedules.
 Manual – When the cleaner process is manually started, it will continuously run until the cleaning
process has finished. Note: the cleaner will not pause until the cleaning job has completed.
 Automatically (default) – The cleaner process automatically starts if it detects that there are:
- No running data ingest
- No running replication processes
- Two minutes of system idle time since the latest data ingest
Once replication or data ingest begins, the cleaner pauses until the three conditions for auto start
become true again. It does not matter if a cleaner schedule has been defined, the DR cleaner will
run during idle times when there is work to be done. In other words, 50 hours of idle time equals
50 hours of cleaner time.
 Forced Run – When the DR is running lower than 1TB of free space or when internal cleaner logs
(PL) are queued to 1 day of cleaner work the cleaner is triggered by the DR to begin. Here the
cleaner will not pause until a full cleaner pass has been completed.
At a minimum, the DR appliance will need to run through a full cleaner pass at least once per week. Dell
recommends the cleaner process to be run 6-8 hours per day or 40-50 hours per week. Running the
cleaner for long contiguous periods of time is more efficient than many short periods of time. For
example, the cleaner will free up disk space more quickly if it is run for 16 hours each day for three days,
instead of 7 hours each day for the week.
When ingestion and/or replication complete, the cleaner will automatically start. When replication and/or
ingestion stops, the cleaner will automatically resume.
If deleting data to free up disk space as quickly as possible is desired, manually running the cleaner is
recommended.