Category Archives: Common

Update: The support matrices for Data Protector 8.00 were updated on 09/19/2013. Microsoft Windows Server 2012 as Cell Server is back on the support matrix.

The support matrices for Data Protector 8.00 were updated on 07/16/2013. Because of problems with the internal database (PostgreSQL) for some customers when using Microsoft Windows Server 2012 as the Cell Server the support for Windows 2012 as a cell server has been temporarily suspended and removed from the matrix “DP8.00_SupportMatrix_Platform_Integration.pdf”. It is assumed that the first patches for Data Protector 8.00 will correct the problems and support becomes available again.

When using Data Protector 8.00 to backup a CIFS share (Network Share Backup), no matter if it is a Windows share or NetApp Filer, it could happen that the job does not backup any data from the share. In more detail, when selecting to backup all folders for the share within the backup specification to backup the complete share, the started job completes with no warnings or errors, but no data written. When selecting single files in subfolders the backup completes as expected and writes data to the tape device. This problem occurs, even if you strictly followed the help for creating network share backup. To add the user to “replace token on process level” does not help either. The root cause is a changed behavior for browsing filesystems (treewalk) in Data Protector 8.00. With the omnirc variable OB2_USE_OLDER_TREEWALK=1 (to be changed for the client which is planned for the CIFS share backup) Data Protector 8.00 will with back to the old behavior for walking the tree. With this change in place now it is possible to backup the NetApp filer. Final comment: it might be more efficient to use the NDMP backup option instead using the network share function.

During the event “Discover” HP announced the newest version of Data Protector – 8.00. The main approach is scalability for HP’s latest version of backup and recovery software. More than thousand clients can be protected by Data Protector, up to 1000 sessions can run concurrently, up to 100000 sessions per day – in a single cell environment. When using the Manager-of-Manager feature up to 5000 clients can be protected and up to 2.5 billions media can be managed with HP Data Protector. With this and other enhancements the software scales over 100x better than the competition. Of course all the successful established technologies, as federated deduplication using StoreOnce and many other new features are included within the new version. Data Protector 8.00 can be downloaded from HP website, it is available on http://www.hp.com/go/dataprotector

When in Data Protector media of a StoreOnce software store become expired, the used disk space is not released immediately. The disk space will be released once the media is overwritten or deleted. The housekeeping process running in the background to release the space will start only when the media is no longer used in Data Protector. Housekeeping requires time and the disk space is not released immediately. At the moment it is not possible to control the housekeeping process via Data Protector (see blackout window in StoreOnce hardware systems), however, it should not run during the time of running backups, as it will slow down the data throughput. Using the global variable DeleteUnprotectedMediaFreq at least it is possible how often during the day expired media are deleted as a trigger for the housekeeping process. With the command omnimm -delete_unprotected_media (for syntax see help of the command) you can manually control the deletion process.