Veritas NetBackup™ OpsCenter Reporting Guide

Disk and Tape Device Activity > Tape Drive Utilization Report

Tape drives are still very popular as backup destinations and are moderately expensive especially if new drives are purchased each time a new update is available such as moving from LTO3 to LTO4. Many times when backup windows are not being met the first thing suggested is more tape drives. What we have found is that in most cases customers are under-utilizing the tape drive investment either due to time of day considerations - i.e. backups cannot run during the day due to performance issues - or they simply have too few Media Servers. OpsCenter and OpsCenter Analytics have a number of drive utilization and throughput reports that can show at a glance when tape drives are being used, and if there are large gaps in usage that could be filled up with changes to the backup Policies. This can help not only fully utilize the drives, but defer a hardware purchase since it is easy to see when the drives have open cycles.

This report shows the utilization (0 - 100%) of tape drives. The report uses the "heat map" concept and depicts ranges of utilization (low to high) through configurable shades of blue for example. Reports are based on either Hour-Of-Day or Day-of- Week. Advanced logic is used to determine the utilization values for each cell in the report. Utilization is calculated off a per minute basis ensuring precision in calculations versus traditional methods of periodic polling of the devices. The reports can be aggregated and filtered at the Tape Library, Media Server, Drive Type, Logical Drive, and Physical Drive levels. The sort options allow for intuitive presentation of voluminous data. These reports are important sources of information for performance analysis and capacity planning activities.

Note that the Tape Drive Utilization report displays data only till 1 A.M. and not till the time when you run the report. This is because OpsCenter collects data for Tape Drive Utilization report once per day at 1 A.M..after midnight. Therefore the Tape Drive Utilization report is only able to report on data up until 1 AM on that day, even when run with a relative timeframe of Previous 24 hours. Similarly if you run Tape Drive Utilization report at 2 P.M. in the afternoon, the reports display data collected till 1 A.M. only.

Figure: Drive Utilization Report shows a sample view of Tape Drive Utilization Report.

Figure: Drive Utilization Report

The following are the details that are associated with the Drive Utilization report:

You can edit the Drive Utilization report to show or hide the columns that you are interested in. All the columns are shown by default. You can also filter the report to view reports of specific master servers. The following table shows the filters for Drive Utilization report and how you can use these filters to view specific data in the report.

Example of filter usage: You may run the report for specific policy names to view the details only for a specific policy. You may run the report for tape drive utilization for a specific job type like Backup to view the details.

The following report enhancements have been made for the Drive Utilization report:

The following filter enhancements have been made for the Tape Drive Utilization report: