Backup Application Basic Guidelines; Virtual Tape Environment - HP StorageWorks 12000 - Virtual Library System EVA Gateway Manual

Figure 15 Virtual Tape Environment
.
In the VLS firmware version 1.x/2.x, the LUN mapping mode is specific to each host. It lets you
manually assign new LUN numbers to the virtual devices visible to the host, and hosts that are not
LUN masked continue to use the default (shared device) LUN numbering. In the firmware version 3.x,
the LUN mapping mode is a global setting across the entire device, and when LUN mapping is
enabled all hosts will only see the virtual devices presented to those hosts (so by default any new host
will see no virtual devices). Also in v3.x, the LUN numbering is automatically generated for any virtual
devices presented to a host.

Backup Application Basic Guidelines

The following are basic configuration guidelines specific to integrating an HP virtual library with
enterprise backup applications:
• Improve performance by using larger tape blocks such as a 256 KB block size
• Improve performance by disabling multiplexing/interleaving, because multiplexing will dramatically
reduce performance for restores and will also reduce deduplication performance. Instead of mul-
tiplexing, create more virtual tape drives and use multistreaming (so that backup jobs run multiple
streams concurrently to multiple tape drives)
• Disable client backup compression because this will defeat target-based deduplication/compression
in the backup device
For more information on backup application configuration optimizations needed for VLS deduplication,
see Detailed Backup Application Guidelines for
StorageWorks backup application implementation guides at
• HP Data Protector
• IBM Tivoli Storage Manager
• EMC NetWorker
• Symantec Backup Exec
50 Backup Solution Design Considerations
VLS. Additional guidelines are available in the HP
http://www.hp.com/go/ebs detailing