Implementation Guidelines; Usage Policy Guidelines - Spectra TFinity User Manual

Appendix A — Best Practices

Implementation Guidelines

Consider the following best practice guidelines as you prepare to
implement MLM in your environment.
Guideline
Identify the people
responsible for backing up
data
Identify the users who will
have responsibilities that
involve MLM
Be consistent with partition
names
On an organizational level,
determine the level of
management your media
requires

Usage Policy Guidelines

Consider the following guidelines when establishing your Media Lifecycle
Management policies.
Guideline
Choose a retirement guideline
Only use MLM-enabled media
and cleaning cartridges in
MLM-compatible libraries and
drives
November 2020
Description
The people who perform data backup at your site are typically the
ones who will be responsible for implementing and following MLM
backup procedures.
It may be wise to have more than a single user familiar with policies,
depending on the size of your organization, so that if one person is
not available, another can take over.
Using consistent naming simplifies identifying a specific partition.
Spectra's suggested naming practice is to list the location, followed
by the library name, followed by the storage management software.
For example, Dallas/TFinity/NetBackup.
The level of media management depends on the requirements for
your environment. For example, you may choose to use Spectra's
guidelines for retirement for all media, or you may choose to retire
tapes that hold financial or legal data sooner than recommended.
See the Error and Warning health scores in Generate MLM Reports
on page 316 for information on when cartridges should be retired.
Description
When implementing MLM, decide at the beginning on the criteria to
be used when determining when to retire a cartridge.
Spectra suggests using the Media Lifecycle Management health
icon, visible on the MLM Reports screen and on the Details screen
(Figure 189 on page 318 and Figure 190 on page 320, respectively)
for each tape, to assess the overall health of individual tapes. See
Generate MLM Reports on page 316 for information about using the
health icon to assess media health.
For the most accurate tracking, do not import your MLM‐enabled
media into non‐Spectra Logic libraries or drive generations earlier
than LTO‐4. The cartridge MAM will not be updated with
information about usage in those locations. As a result, the
information about usage in those locations will not be recorded in
the MLM database when the cartridge is returned to your library.
Implementation Guidelines
User Guide—Spectra TFinity Library
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