HP-UX 11.11 and Ultrium 960

[Kishore Gowda]

I am looking to upgrade the current DLT tape drive with Ultrium 960 drives. I have few questions in this regard. We have to use fbackup for data comptability sake, so can fbackup take advantage of parallel streaming available in 960? Is any tuning required in fbackup to acheive best performance using Ultrium 960? Also, what are the patches to support Ultrium 960 in 11.11 environment? The tape drive will attach to either N4000 or RP8400 server, so what type of controller card is required?
Thanks,
Kishore

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

Those tape drives use lvd scsi. You can see the scsi card for either system by looking up the server docs at http://docs.hp.com

I have never had to do anything with this drive other than recompile the kernel with the stape driver installed.

If its an HP drive its fully supported without patching.

You can compile the kernel manual or use sam kernel configuration drivers to put the stape drvier into the kernel.

The recompile must be followed by a system restart.

SEP

[Bill Hassell · Accepted solution]

As Stephen mentioned, make sure you have the stape driver in the kernel. The latest version is found in PHKL_34552. You know if you don't as ioscan will report the drive as unclaimed. fbackup is definitely sensitive to different models of tape drives (unlike tar and cpio, etc) so load the latest fbackup cumulative patch PHCO_28998.

Just like before, you must use an fbackup config file for best performance. If you have not been using a config file, your backups have been taking a lot longer than necessary. Here is the file to use for DDS, DLT and LTO (Ultrium) drives:

blocksperrecord 4096
records 64
checkpointfreq 4096
readerprocesses 6
maxretries 5
retrylimit 5000000
maxvoluses 200
filesperfsm 2000

(actually, this file should be used for any modern tape drive). Now the 960 has an enormous data transfer rate so it CANNOT be put on the same interface as disks. If you use a compression tape drive devicefile (ie, 0mn or something with BEST in the name) then the *minimum* data rate required to keep the tape running at full speed is 120 Mb/sec. fbackup can maintain this rate by running 6 separate reader processes at the same time. The term "parallel streaming" is a bit ambiguous (the drive doesn't have such a feature), but probably refers to multi-threaded or multiple processes that read data from several disks at the same time and pour the data into a common buffer (shared memory) to be written to the tape.

fbackup is the only bundled tool that can do this while several backup programs including Data Protector can also perform this task. As with any high performance tape drive, other activities on the disks besides the backup will interfere with full speed performance.

[Kishore Gowda]

Bill & Steve - Thank you for your replies. I have another question regarding fbackup. We are planning to purchase Ultrium 960 to backup Oracle 9i database using fbackup. We have a need to send Oracle data on tape to our vendor for product fixes, enhancement, etc. We currently use Networker and vendor use Veritas backup, so common backup format is to use fbackup. The database size is about 600Gb, and I just want to make sure that fbackup can scale to backup large databases with datafiles over 8Gb? If fbackup is not ideal, please recommend alternate solutions. Thanks!

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi Kishore:

> We have a need to send Oracle data on tape to our vendor for product fixes, enhancement, etc.

Beware! 'fbackup' and 'frecover' are proprietray HP-UX tools. You cannot read a tape created with 'fbackup' on a non-HP-UX server.

Regards!

...JRF...

[Bill Hassell]

Yes, fbackup can handle ANY size file available on your HP-UX system - terabytes, no limitations. And yes, fbackup is unique to HP-UX. If you need to interchange with your vendor, you'll need to agree on a common utility.

[Kishore Gowda]

James - This is mainly used to transfer data between HP-UX servers. Thank you for your input. Regards.

[Eric Jacklin]

Hi all

If your single file contain more then 2 GB then please do not go with FBACKUP. IT is risk.

[inex]

Hi,

Is it like this that fbackup will not work with bigger files than 2GB?

Thanks - inex

[Bill Hassell]

No, fbackup is specifically designed for files of any size (any file on HP-UX). There is no risk using this program and in fact is recommended for high performance tape drives like the Ultrium 960. Legacy programs like cpio and tar cannot handle large files such as 100 GB.