Spectra T200 - Best Practices; MLM Best Practices

Appendix A — Best Practices MLM Best Practices
December 2019 User Guide—Spectra T200, T380, and T680 Libraries
508
Implementation Guidelines
Consider the following best practice guidelines as you prepare to
implement MLM in your environment.
Usage Policy Guidelines
Consider the following guidelines when establishing your Media Lifecycle
Management policies.
Guideline Description
Identify the people
responsible for backing up
data
The people who perform data backup at your site are typically the
ones who are responsible for implementing and following MLM
backup procedures.
Identify the users who have
responsibilities that involve
MLM
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.
Be consistent with partition
names
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/T680/NetBackup.
On an organizational level,
determine the level of
management your media
requires
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 298 for information on when cartridges should be retired.
Guideline Description
Choose a retirement guideline 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 170 on page 300 and Figure 171 on page 302, respectively)
for each tape, to assess the overall health of individual tapes. See
Generate MLM Reports on page 298 for information about using the
health icon to assess media health.
Always operate the library
with Media Lifecycle
Management enabled
If you disable and then re-enable Media Lifecycle Management, any
loads, reads, writes, errors, and any other tape related events that
occur while MLM is disabled are not recorded in the MLM
database.
Only use MLM-enabled media
and cleaning cartridges in
MLM-compatible libraries and
drives
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.