Creating Archive Tapes From The Target; Recovery Options Physical Tape - HP StorageWorks 12000 - Virtual Library System EVA Gateway Manual

Figure 39 Recovery Options — Physical Tape
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Creating Archive Tapes from the Target

Even with replication removing the need for physical tape offsite, there are still many users who wish
to use physical tape for archive or test recoveries, etc. An archive tape will have the following
differences from the original backup:
• A different retention time from the original backup (for example, you may keep backups and offsite
replicas for three months but keep tape archive for several years).
• Different cartridge contents because it will be a different size (optimum virtual cartridge size for
deduplication is 50-100 GB but physical tapes such as LTO-4 are 800 GB).
• A different barcode and be tracked separately in the backup application.
These characteristics mean that the backup application must control the creation of the archive tape
and must use an object-copy based system (cannot use a whole-tape copy system). This is easy if the
physical library is on the source site because you can use the normal backup application object-copy
mechanisms to simply copy from the source virtual library to the physical library via the backup
application media servers. However, if the physical library is at the target site and you want to perform
the tape archive from the replicated virtual cartridges in the target device, this requires additional
steps. This is because the backup application at the target device that sees the replicated virtual
cartridges cannot be the same backup application that performed the backups at the source site (see
Backup Application Interaction with
any information about the replicated cartridges in its media database because it did not back up to
those tapes.
Replication). The target site backup application does not have
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