I'm trying to come up with a way to reduce the number of tapes that are getting used for the duplication function in my SLPs. I found I had a problem with different tape retention, I fixed that, but I'm still using 4 tapes a night, and none of them are full, in fact two of them only have 6 images each. I've looked and there are duplications running all over the place at night,. I was thnking that maybe if I create a window to run them in, it will combine more of them together and hopfully make better use of the tape.
I have three SLP, two for customer backups from two different disk pools, and one for the catalog backups that need to go offsite. They all have the same retention level for disk and tape. It used to only take one tape when it was configured to do the duplications from a special vault profile. The problem there was it would fail or not duplicate some images, so I wanted to use the more failsafe SLP method to control the storage locations, replications to the DR site and the duplication to local tape. It's working great, just using a lot more of the customers tapes.
Here is some data from the tapes from last night: (see attched file)
One thing I noticed was that after things crossed over midnight and the date of the data expiration changes it used new tapes. Would having the duplication all done after midnight make them all the same day? I would be happy to get it down from 4 tapes to 2.
Any thoughts or comments?