VTL D2D4004fc Ticket's password

[nkumada]

I want to know Ticket password of D2D4004fc.


I have problem about transefer speed from Proliant Server to HP D2DBS VTL(Virtual Tape Library).

In case transefer 60GBytes,need 3hours to transefer.

So,I had requested resolve this problem to Japanese HP Customer CareCenter,and I send them D2D Ticket file which ziped with password(include logs of D2D VTL).

This file was ziped with password by HP D2D VTL.

but,They can not resolve it password,and suggested me to update firmware.

However,I can NOT update firmware right now due to our service schedule.

Would you please tell me it password or way to resolve this.

regards.

P.S. This thread has been moved from Tape Backup (Small and Medium Business) to Disk-Based Backup. - Hp forum moderator

[Dave Dewar]

Nkumada,

You need to work with HP support resolve the poor performance issues you are seeing. If they have recommended a firmware upgrade that that should be your starting point. There have been a number of performance improvement delivered via firmware updates in the past year and there will be further updates during this year as HP continously improves its product family.

There are performance best practices in the D2D Solution guide and best practice performance D2D whitepaper available on hp.com from the support area that are very useful self help guides.

Some areas of the support ticket are password protected for good reason. HP would not release the password for these areas.

I would think it very unlikely that you would be able to debug your performance issue from having access to the password protected area with HP support help as you would not understand the information contained within.

[nkumada]

Dear Dave Dewar.

Thank you for your reply and kindness.
I know the best way to resolve this problem is update firmware.

However,I want to repair this problem without service stop and take high risk(I'm thinking that updating firmware is risk to lost the data on VTL).

and,We can obtain password if require according to HP Documents.
Please see below URL if you well.

http://bizsupport.austin.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?objectID=c01556761〈=en&cc=us&taskId=125&prodSeriesId=3741179&prodTypeId=329290

I will update firmware finally if no way to resolve this problem without update.

Thank you for your corporation.

[Dave Dewar]

Nkumada,

You should be ok from a data integrity standpoint upgrading the firmware. We have taken a lot of precautions to ensure a firmware upgrade keeps the VTL data intact.

The HP document you reference is correct. However, since that was written we have actually "unpassword protected" some areas of the support ticket but there is an inner zip file that remains password protected. You should be able to see some content within the outer zip file.

Which firmware version do you currently have? If you want you can attach a ticket to this thread and I will take a brief look for you to see if I can provide you with some pointers to consider.

I do advise you to work with HP support officially if you can though.

Cheers,

Dave Dewar

[nkumada]

Dear Dave Dewar.

Thank you for your reply.
Please don't mind if I do,Firmware version and Ticket are as follows.


Firmware Revision : pf86-002.10
GUI Version : GUI_0_48
Date of Build : 2008/06/25 10:30


Ticket file downloded from Administrator Page ware attached on this thread(Zip file only).

> I do advise you to work with HP support officially if you can though.

Thank you for your advice.
I will request them to resolve this problem and tell us futher advice.

Thank you for your corporation.

[Dave Dewar · Accepted solution]

Hi Nkumada,

Your firmware is very old and so the information in teh support ticket is limited. There have been several versions released since that have included performance improvements so I recommend upgrading. This will also provide a richer supprot ticket.

The component firmware of your hard disks, smartarray controller etc are also very old. If you go to supports/driver on hp.com for your product there will be instruction on how to upgrade components - or HP support will be able to explain it to you.

You appear to have a single library configured for your backups with one tapr drive and 24 slots. That will not be optimum for performance as you will only be sending one stream to the appliance of max performance. The appliance works best with multiple streams - multiple tape drives active concurrently.
There is also quite a bit of houskeeping maintenance tasks occuring in the background which will impact performance. Housekeeping is generated when overwriting as the appliance has to reference overwritten data.

Given you only appear to have about 10% disk usage I wonder whether you have been reformatting or deleting cartridges from your library rather than just letting them expire and get overwritten? Formatting and deleting full cartridges can create alot of housekeeping.

The support ticket does not tell me how much housekeeping you have queued up due to the age of the firmware. Upgrading firmware will help to clear it as there have been throughput improvements for housekeeping since your version.

You could consider cereating a 2nd library and mvoing your backups to that one and when your first lirbary data is no longer needed, delete this entire library as that will clear any housekeeping associated with that library/store.

If you want to free space up deleting a library when its no longer needed is much better than deleting individual cartridges since each library has its own deplication store and given its a deduplication appliance deleting individual cartridges will not free up that amount of "user data".

I would suggest you read through the best practices whitepaper as this will describe in detail the steps you should follow to get the best performance from your appliance and help you construct a backup policy that optimises appliance usage for housekeeping.

Your deduplication ratio is quite poor - are you sending multiplexed data to your single tape drive? This would be occurrin if you have set concurrency greater than 1 in your ISV software. The best practices document will cover this as well.

Cheers,

Dave

[nkumada]

Dear Dave Dewar.

Thank your for your helpful reply,and sorry for late.

I have 24slots with 1drive as you writeen.
and,I designed backup jobs can backup only 1drive.

Can I question?
You suggested me to make 2nd library for performance,Is it mean purpose for reduce time to backup? or wrong way using 24slots with one drive?

Can I use 24slots,1library with 2drives?

now,I'm tring to understand about housekeeping.I didn't know about this.

Thank you for your corporation,always.
regards.

[Dave Dewar]

Nkumada,

I have linked the performance best practices whitepaper for you.
http://bizsupport1.austin.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c01805012/c01805012.pdf

Page 7 of this document contains a graph that explains my suggestion regarding using multiple tape drives working in parallel to acheive best performance.
Using a single tape drive for your backups, you will only be able to acheive upto about 40% of the maximum performance.

It is ok to use the appliance with a single 24 slot library and 1 tape drive but you should not expect to get full performannce if you use it this way.

You can set up a variety of library configurations with different numbers of cartridges and drives on the appliance. using the D2Dgeneric library option gives you the most flexibility.

Cheers,

Dave Dewar

[nkumada]

Dave Dewar.

Thank you for your reply and sorry for late.
I negotiated with Japan HP spending time.

As result,I will redesign,rebuild this product.and redesign the operation.
for example,I will do follow things.

turn off house keeping function
change TAPE Librarly which simulated and use 4 strems to backup.

finally,Japan HP CunstomerService will help us to update firmware,on site.

maybe,all problems will clear.

If you didn't suggested me about this product,I can't resolve problem by only my knowledge.

Thank you for your all.

regards.

[Dave Dewar]

Nkumada,

You will not be able to turn off housekeeping unless you were to set up libraries with deduplication turned off. Not a good chocie if you want to take advantage of that technology.

You can control the amount of housekeeping generated by optimising your backups, media pooling etc as described in the best practices doc.

Redesigning with a multiple drive library and running several backups in parallel will give you good aggregate performance improvements.

Good luck

Dave