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100 Setting Up the Dell™ DR Series System on Symantec™ Backup Exec™ | April 2015
Type
Capacity
Max number of Tapes supported
LTO-2
200GiB
8000
LTO-1
100Gib
10000
LTO-1
50Gib
10000
LTO-1
10GiB
10000
Note: With a VTL container, it is very easy to add additional tapes as and when required. It is
recommended to add tapes in the increments of 50 and 100 to facilitate easy inventory from Backup
Exec. Check the Backup Exec recommendations for the maximum number of tapes supported.
C.2.6 Space reclamation guidelines
The DR Series system v3.2 Virtual Tape Library feature is presented to operating systems and data
management applications alike as devices either through iSCSI or NDMP protocol connectivity. The DMA
interfaces with the virtual tape library and all its underlying components including the drives and media
though these specific protocols.
The DMA must interact with the virtual tape media during a recycle, reuse or media initialization process in
order for the DR to be able to reclaim space during its own cleaning cycle.
This two-step process is required so that the backup software can reconcile the space by marking the
media as expired then reusing it, consolidating space across volumes/tapes or by simply recycling the
media into a scratch pool. Once these operations have been completed the DRs own cleaning cycle
should be used to reclaim that virtual tape media space which in turn will free up physical space on the DR
unit.
Implementing proper media pool, groups and recycling practices will allow the virtual tape media to be
used at optimal levels and that the underlying physical space be reclaimed accordingly by the scheduled
DR reclamation.
Note: In general the guidelines provided above should be sufficient for normal operations to insure proper
reclamation of space is conducted preemptively. Refer your individual DMA applications for best practices
and guidelines regarding tape reuse.