Microfocus (HP) Data Protector, Azure backups and archiving

DataProtector can only restore from Azure container blobs that have an access tier of Cool or Hot. This is a pity, because Archive is so much cheaper, particularly if you buy it up-front. If the media you are trying to restore from is in the Archive tier, you will get an error like this:

[Normal] From: RSM@cellmgr.ifost.org.au ""  Time: 16/06/2020 11:06:26 AM
Restore session 2020/06/16-8 started.

[Normal] From: RMA@cellmgr.ifost.org.au "Azure_gw_via_cellmgr [GW 6588:0:16462780082409836283]"  Time: 16/06/2020 11:06:27 AM
STARTING Media Agent "Azure_gw_via_cellmgr [GW 6588:0:16462780082409836283]"

[Normal] From: RMA@cellmgr.ifost.org.au "Azure_gw_via_cellmgr [GW 6588:0:16462780082409836283]"  Time: 16/06/2020 11:06:28 AM
Loading medium from slot \\hpdparchivelongterm.blob.core.windows.net\general\531504b0_5ee2f861_04e4_038f to device Azure_gw_via_cellmgr [GW 6588:0:16462780082409836283]

[Major] From: RMA@cellmgr.ifost.org.au "Azure_gw_via_cellmgr [GW 6588:0:16462780082409836283]"  Time: 16/06/2020 11:06:29 AM
[90:54]  \\hpdparchivelongterm.blob.core.windows.net\general\531504b0_5ee2f861_04e4_038f
Cannot open device (System error)

[Normal] From: RMA@cellmgr.ifost.org.au "Azure_gw_via_cellmgr [GW 6588:0:16462780082409836283]"  Time: 16/06/2020 11:06:29 AM
Unloading medium to slot \\hpdparchivelongterm.blob.core.windows.net\general\531504b0_5ee2f861_04e4_038f from device Azure_gw_via_cellmgr [GW 6588:0:16462780082409836283]

[Normal] From: RMA@cellmgr.ifost.org.au "Azure_gw_via_dc1hdp01 [GW 6588:0:16462780082409836283]"  Time: 16/06/2020 11:06:29 AM
ABORTED Media Agent "Azure_gw_via_cellmgr [GW 6588:0:16462780082409836283]"

It’s not a big deal, you just have to find the corresponding blob(s) in the azure portal and bring them out of archive.

If you are reading this blog post because you’ve just seen that error, it’s pretty straightforward to find what you need to fix. The medium it is loading is: \\hpdparchivelongterm.blob.core.windows.net\general\531504b0_5ee2f861_04e4_038f

 ... which corresponds to the name of the name of the blob, except for the _0 on the end. (Azure has limitations on the size of a blob, so Data Protector media can span several blobs.)

 

On the other hand, if you are reading this blog because you are writing procedures for the future, then go to the Media tab, select "All media" and expand the column until you can see the medium id.

Then you can double-check in the Azure portal that it is in the right tier.

DataProtector technical workshop in New Zealand

Email brandon.voight@hpe.com if you are interested. It's on next week.

Date: Wednesday, 5 October 2016
Time: 8.30am to 1.00pm

Location:  Hewlett Packard Enterprise Office
Level 4, 22 Viaduct Harbour Avenue, Auckland 1011

Brandon and Paul Carapetis will be talking about:

• New features from the latest versions of Data Protector
• Integration with VMware, Hyper-V, and HPE hardware: 3PAR and StoreOnce
• Road map for the year ahead
• Introduction to New Related Products: Backup Navigator, Connected, Storage Optimizer, and VM Explorer

Automate the installation of a Windows DataProtector client

A client today wanted to push the DataProtector agent from SCCM / System Center 2012 instead of from Data Protector. It's not that difficult, but I couldn't find the command-line setup documented anywhere.

You will need to run (as an administrator):

  net use r: \\installserver.ifost.org.au\Omniback

  r:

  cd \x8664

  msiexec /i "Data Protector A.09.00.msi" /passive INSTALLATIONTYPE=Client ADDLOCAL=core,da,autodr

  net use /delete r:

Obviously, substitute installserver.ifost.org.au with your install server, and if R: is already allocated, use something else instead.

Then, trigger the following command on your cell manager:

 omnicc -import_host clientname

Replace clientname with the name of the client.

Script this as appropriate (e.g. after the operating system has booted) in order to have an unattended installation.

Data Protector CRS operation cannot be performed in full-screen mode

Today's head-scratcher: after upgrading to 9.07 on a Windows cell manager, the CRS service won't start.

Eventvwr says something even weirder:

The Data Protector CRS service terminated with service-specific error The requested operation cannot be performed in full-screen mode.. 

I was in full screen mode at the time, but it still wouldn't start even when I minimised my RDP session. For my own sanity, I was glad of this.

Trawling through Daniel Braun's http://www.data-protector.org blog, I saw some comments there that it could be related to anti-virus software. Nope, not that either.

The debug.log said something a little bit more believable:

[SmCreateTable] MapViewOfFile(size:17505216) failed, error=[5] Access is denied.

I discovered that I could reliably get that message added that message every time I tried to start the CRS. But what is actually being denied?

So I ran omnisv start -debug 1-500 crm-vexatious.txt

I then had a 160KB file created in C:\programdata\omniback\tmp that began with OB2DBG, ended with crm-vexatious.txt and had CRM in the filename. Good: at least it gets far enough that it can create debug messages.

Scrollling right to the bottom of it, there it was:

Code is:1007  SystemErr: [5] Access is denied
************************   DEFAULT ERROR REPORT   ***************
[Critical] From CRS@cellmgr.ifost.org.au "" Time: 5/8/2016 1:00:33PM
Unable to allocate shared memory: Unknown internal error.

Internally, the function to return a shared memory segement presumably encodes something as 1007; CRS then exits with that code (which is the standard Windows error code for "can't be performed in full-screen mode").

There aren't many reasons for a shared memory allocation to fail. In fact, the only one I can think of that could be relevant here is if the segment already exists. I thought about figuring out what the equivalent to ipcrm is on Windows, gave up and rebooted the box.

And it came up perfectly. Funnily enough, if I had had no idea what I was doing, I would have just bounced the box to see if it would have fixed it, and saved myself a headache and some stress wondering what was going on. Ignorance would have been bliss.

GRE for Linux requirements

If you are using Data Protector to backup your VMware environment, and you have Linux boxes, you might have tried to use the Granular Recovery Extension (VMware GRE). The GRE lets you recover individual files from a VM-level or VMDK-level backup; it does this by mounting the VMDK file on a Linux GRE proxy.

There are three variations of GRE restore:

• If you backup to a StoreOnce device (e.g. a B6200, a D2D4500, a StoreOnce virtual appliance, or a software storeonce component on a Windows or Linux member of the cell)... then you need a very large disk and not much else.
• If you backup using 3PAR snapshots (which works very well indeed) and you are doing a GRE recovery from a snapshot, you don't need a big disk or anything else much at all -- just something connected to the 3PAR the meets the usual (documented) list of requirements.
• The very weirid case is if you use a SmartCache device. These are uncompressed, raw disk spaces for putting VMware backups on to. The SmartCache is accessed by the Windows and Linux proxies via Windows file sharing. Thus the Linux GRE proxy server needs to have Samba installed on it.

One remaining issue, that I hope gets fixed one day soon: the machine that you want to restore to has to have a world-writeable NFS share. Ouch: given that it is copying from one Linux box to another Linux box, I'm not quite sure why this couldn't have been done with SFTP. So I suspect everyone will just have a multi-stage restore for GRE on Linux boxes:

• Load the backup from StoreOnce onto a large disk.
• Restore files from that to a server with an insecure NFS share.
• Copy from the NFS share via SSH to the actual server where you needed the file restored.

I presume also that setuid / setgid binaries are therefore not supported for GRE restore. (Because who creates a world-writeable NFS share without the nosetuid,nosetgid options enabled?) Implication: you can't restore /usr or /sbin from a VMware backup reliably.

Of course, you might find it cheaper to use VMX (https://store.data-protector.net/collections/vmx-licenses) instead of Data Protector -- it is much cheaper than the equivalent GRE and VEAgent licenses. As far as I know, it doesn't face these limitations.

Greg Baker is an independent consultant who happens to do a lot of work on HPE DataProtector. He is the author of the only published books on HP Data Protector (http://www.ifost.org.au/books/#dp). He works with HPE and HPE partner companies to solve the hardest big-data problems (especially around backup). See more at IFOST's DataProtector pages at http://www.ifost.org.au/dataprotector, or visit the online store for Data Protector products, licenses and renewals at http://store.data-protector.net/ 

Data Protector e-learning is now available -- with a special bundle

I've negotiated some very good pricing with HPE for their e-learning content -- as far as I can tell, there is no way of getting access to it anywhere in the world cheaper except by stealing it. I've sweetened the deal with a bundle of all my Data Protector 9 books and a virtual lab environment offer.

I've only got an English samples, but it's available in several languages. Have a look at some sample course content to get a feel of what it's like. (It's very similar to the Data Protector Essentials course).

There are interactive simulations which give hands-on practice very simply and easily. And finally, there are job aids supplied as part of the package.

---

Available for purchase now (along with lots of other Data Protector resources, books, licenses)...
https://store.data-protector.net/collections/training-courses/products/data-protector-e-learning-course


Greg Baker is an independent consultant who happens to do a lot of work on HPE DataProtector. He is the author of the only published books on HP Data Protector (http://www.ifost.org.au/books/#dp). He works with HPE and HPE partner companies to solve the hardest big-data problems (especially around backup). See more at IFOST's DataProtector pages at http://www.ifost.org.au/dataprotector, or visit the online store for Data Protector products, licenses and renewals at http://store.data-protector.net/ 

Data Protector tools now on github

I've written a number of tools that help when administering Data Protector. I did some spring cleaning (in Autumn), found all of them that I could, and put them into a github repository.

Here's the README from it... https://github.com/solresol/dp-tools

dp-tools

Programs to support HPe Data Protector

Performance tools

• omniperf.pl - This program prints out the throughput rate of the specified sessions, or all current sessions if no sessions are specified.
• omniperfreport.pl - This program prints out a report on DataProtector backup throughput performance for a completed session.

Tools for migrating between cell managers and keeping them in sync

• device-replicator.pl - A script to make a two cell managers have the same pools
• dp-move-clients.pl - Generate a script to export/import every client in a cell
• mcf-all-media.pl - This program walks through everything in the media management database and writes MCF files out to the output directory, unless they already exist on the (optionally specified) target server. Then it copies it to target-server-directory (with an extension of .temp, which gets changed to .mcf once it is complete).
• mega-import.pl - watches for files in the watch-directory that end in .mcf. When it sees one, it checks to see if it is already known about in the DataProtector internal database. If it is not already in the database, it is imported.
• pool-replicator.pl - A script to make a two cell managers have the same pools

Tools for copying sessions between cell managers

These are mostly obsolete as of DP 9.04 because you would typically create a copy job from one cell manager's storeonce to the another cell manager's storeonce. These are still relevant if you want to keep physical tapes in two locations.

• mcfreceive.pl - process incoming MCF files
• mcfsend.pl - A script to export MCF files after a backup

Software for keeping track of tapes

• tape-zap.py - a command-line program which updates the Data Protector database of tape locations by letting you zap the tapes with a barcode reader device
• tapescan.py - a CGI version of tape-zap.py

Miscellaneous programs that don't fit elsewhere

• library-pooling.pl - This program files media in a tape library into one of two media pools, based on their slot number.
• omnisms.pl - This program sends an SMS through the ValueSMS gateway to report on mount requests. It can be used as a mount script for a device.
• try-all-devices.pl - Exercises every device (tape, storeonce, etc) by running a tiny backup to it

---

Greg Baker is an independent consultant who happens to do a lot of work on HP DataProtector. He is the author of the only published books on HP Data Protector (http://www.ifost.org.au/books/#dp). He works with HP and HP partner companies to solve the hardest big-data problems (especially around backup). See more at IFOST's DataProtector pages at http://www.ifost.org.au/dataprotector, or visit the online store for Data Protector products, licenses and renewals athttp://store.data-protector.net/ 

Backup Navigator Trial -- last chance

If you are in Australia, New Zealand or Germany, HPE is offering a trial of Backup Navigator hosted in the cloud. If you want to take this up, you really need to sign up now because the the APAC hosting will end at the end of February and the remote agent needs a bit of time to upload your data. Sign-up form here: http://engage.hpe.com/Reg_NavTrial_Blog

On the other hand, if you are reading this in a different time or space, then here's a link to
Buy a Backup Navigator License. I can also organise for you an ISO of the Navigator software or a pre-configured virtual machine with a 60 day evaluation license.


Greg Baker is an independent consultant who happens to do a lot of work on HP DataProtector. He is the author of the only published books on HP Data Protector (http://www.ifost.org.au/books/#dp). He works with HP and HP partner companies to solve the hardest big-data problems (especially around backup). See more at IFOST's DataProtector pages at http://www.ifost.org.au/dataprotector, or visit the online store for Data Protector products, licenses and renewals athttp://store.data-protector.net/ 

VMware 3PAR integrated backups

HPE recently added a feature to Data Protector which will appeal to customers running VMware and using 3PAR storage. You can now backup your VMware environment by taking 3PAR snapshots and then backing up the snapshot. This reduces load on your VMware environment. You can also leave the snapshot around in case you want to do a fast restore.

If you already have licenses for 3PAR snapshots (which most customers do) and you are using a Data Protector capacity license (which most recent customers are) then you can do this for free.

(Customers using Data Protector classic license need to pay for a ZDB license but they are surprisingly cheap.)

I've got a customer doing this right now, and they are getting around 250MB/s of backup speed (this is LAN-free, with a relatively old Windows server mounting the snapshot and then writing to a D2D4700 using Catalyst-over-Fibrechannel).

The documentation has a few holes (such as neglecting to mention that you need to use omnidbzdb --ompasswd to tell Data Protector which 3PAR account to use) but overall it seems to be more reliable than traditional VMware snapshots.

Here's the backup flow:

• Prepare all the virtual machines
• Tell VMware to snapshot the VMDK
• Tell the 3PAR to snapshot the LUN the VMDK is on.
• Tell VMware to release the VMDK snapshot
• Mount the LUN snapshot on a spare ESXi server (which can be part of the Vsphere environment, it just has to be explicitly also imported into to the client list)
• Mount the snapshot LUN on a physical host that has access to the 3PAR storage and your backup device
• Tell VMware to make a virtual machine (named after the original virtual machine)
• Attach the VMDK on that snapshot LUN to the new virtual machine
• Backup the virtual machines
• Tell the ESXi server to snapshot the VMDK (dumb, I know)
• The backup host reads from the LUN, and writes to the StoreOnce
• Unmount the LUN from the backup host
• Tell the ESXi server to release the VMDK snapshot
• Clean up each virtual machine
• Destroy the virtual machines on the ESXi server.
• Destroy the LUN snapshot on the 3PAR

If this is something you want to do -- and it really does work very well -- let me know and I can organise licenses and/or implementation for you.

Greg Baker is an independent consultant who happens to do a lot of work on HPE DataProtector. He is the author of the only published books on HP Data Protector (http://www.ifost.org.au/books/#dp). He works with HPE and HPE partner companies to solve the hardest big-data problems (especially around backup). See more at IFOST's DataProtector pages at http://www.ifost.org.au/dataprotector, or visit the online store for Data Protector products, licenses and renewals at http://store.data-protector.net/ 

Data Protector Granular Recovery Extension (GRE) and HP OneView don't play nicely together

Are you tearing your hair out about this mysterious error?

Http Error - 500 
{"message":"Unexpected error :There was a problem while sending query to service https://cellmgr.ifost.org.au:7116/dp-gui/grePlugin/GetMountProxies.jsp?newMachineTypeParam=MountProxy. Check that this agent is accessible."}

Then you are presumably trying to configure the HPE DataProtector Granular Recovery Extension (GRE) in version 9.05. And sometimes it works, and then.... it doesn't. Even when you haven't changed anything.

What's going on is that if anyone starts HP OneView on that Vsphere server, the GRE will start getting that error. The only workaround at the moment is to restart the Vsphere server (!) and try again, and hope that no-one looks at OneView.

Or uninstall OneView.

Or uninstall Data Protector VMware Granular Recovery Extension.

HPE's tracking code for this problem is QCCR2A65688, but at the moment it's still under investigation.

In the interim, just hope that you don't need to restore an individual file from a VMware-level backup because you will be manually restoring the VMDK, manually mounting it and then collecting the files out that you want.

You can also ditch VMware-level backups for the moment, install an agent and use file-level backups until it's resolved.

I'll update this blog post when a fix is released.


Greg Baker is an independent consultant who happens to do a lot of work on HPE DataProtector. He is the author of the only published books on HP Data Protector (http://www.ifost.org.au/books/#dp). He works with HPE and HPE partner companies to solve the hardest big-data problems (especially around backup). See more at IFOST's DataProtector pages at http://www.ifost.org.au/dataprotector, or visit the online store for Data Protector products, licenses and renewals at http://store.data-protector.net/ 

Forever cycling through device discovery - Cannot open exchanger control device ([122] The data area passed to a system call is too small. )

I spent some time with the HPE response centre on this problem -- an IBM 3584 tape library that Data Protector could discover (badly) but couldn't use and kept cycling back through path discovery.

[Normal] From: MSM@dp.ifost.org.au "IBM 3584 L32"  Time: 15/01/2016 11:49:07 AM
Media session 2016/01/15-23 started.

[Normal] From: UMA@dp.ifost.org.au "IBM 3584 L32"  Time: 15/01/2016 11:49:07 AM
STARTING Media Agent "IBM 3584 L32"

[Warning] From: UMA@dp.ifost.org.au "IBM 3584 L32"  Time: 15/01/2016 11:59:10 AM
[90:59]   Changer0:0:0:1
Cannot open exchanger control device (Details unknown.)

[Warning] From: UMA@dp.ifost.org.au "IBM 3584 L32"  Time: 15/01/2016 11:59:10 AM
The device "IBM 3584 L32" could not be opened("Device could not be accessed") 

[Normal] From: UMA@dp.ifost.org.au "IBM 3584 L32"  Time: 15/01/2016 11:59:10 AM
Starting the device path discovery process. 

[Normal] From: UMA@dp.ifost.org.au "IBM 3584 L32"  Time: 15/01/2016 11:59:12 AM
A new path(s) "Changer0:0:0:1" found for device "IBM 3584 L32" and stored. 

[Normal] From: UMA@dp.ifost.org.au "IBM 3584 L32"  Time: 15/01/2016 11:59:12 AM
Device path discovery process finished. 

[Critical] From: UMA@dp.ifost.org.au "IBM 3584 L32"  Time: 15/01/2016 12:09:15 PM
[90:59]   dp.ifost.org.au : Changer0:0:0:1
Cannot open exchanger control device ([122] The data area passed to a system call is too small. )

[Normal] From: UMA@dp.ifost.org.au "IBM 3584 L32"  Time: 15/01/2016 12:09:15 PM
ABORTED Media Agent "IBM 3584 L32"


============================================================================
                      0 cartridges out of 0 successfully scanned.
============================================================================

In the end, it was a Data Protector bug (in Data Protector 9.05, and probably earlier versions too). It's fixed with QCIM2A65833_IB2, available to anyone with a support contract. (Speaking of support contracts, I offer a Support Contract Review with a money-saved or money-back guarantee).

Greg Baker is an independent consultant who happens to do a lot of work on HPE DataProtector. He is the author of the only published books on HP Data Protector (http://www.ifost.org.au/books/#dp). He works with HPE and HPE partner companies to solve the hardest big-data problems (especially around backup). See more at IFOST's DataProtector pages at http://www.ifost.org.au/dataprotector, or visit the online store for Data Protector products, licenses and renewals at http://store.data-protector.net/ 

Survey on omniabort extensions in Data Protector

Sometimes, a Data Protector session will hang. The backup session manager (bsm) process doesn't exit even though all the disk agents and media agents have long since finished. I wrote a blog post about it (http://blog.ifost.org.au/2014/05/how-to-kill-hanging-session.html), including how to fix it, but Tara F asked if there's a way of killing the BSM process and leaving the status of the session as "Completed".

As far as I know, there isn't.

I wrote:

Maybe we should lobby for this as a feature request -- if a bsm receives (say) SIGUSR1 then it should quit and report a successful session. Or perhaps there should be a -kill option to omniabort which can say whether it was a good ending. 

e.g.
omniabort -kill -ok

500 people have read the "How to kill a hanging session", almost all of whom came in via Google searches to that page. This suggests it's a reasonably common problem. So I wondered if we could try something a little different: what if we lobbied HPE for this feature?

Normally, the right thing to do is to log a feature request under your support call. Do this for any really important stuff. But this is a small request that will make a small amount of difference to a large number of customers, so I'm interested to see if this works.

Here's the survey, with three questions: 

• Do you want omniabort -kill?
• Do you want omniabort -kill -ok?
• Can HPE get a copy of the session report automatically when you use these?

[Google Form Survey]

Greg Baker is an independent consultant who happens to do a lot of work on HPE DataProtector. He is the author of the only published books on HP Data Protector (http://www.ifost.org.au/books/#dp). He works with HPE and HPE partner companies to solve the hardest big-data problems (especially around backup). See more at IFOST's DataProtector pages at http://www.ifost.org.au/dataprotector, or visit the online store for Data Protector products, licenses and renewals at http://store.data-protector.net/ 

Expect script to audit Data Protector versions

In the grand scheme of things, what I'm about to share is not a terribly useful script.

I had a cell where Data Protector was reporting that the clients were at a different version to what they really were. Normally this is easy to fix: right click on the client and select "Check Installation" and it will sort itself out.

But in this case, the hostname of the client computer didn't match the DNS name known by the cell manager. So the check installation failed before it had a chance to probe what version was running on the client.

This can also be solved by re-running "Upgrade Components". But for tedious reasons, this wasn't an option either.

I really wanted to know what version everything was at, and I had a Linux box handy, and it had Expect on it. (Actually it didn't, but I was able to run yum install expect). This is what I put together:

#!/usr/bin/expect -f

set timeout 30

log_user 0

set cellmember [lindex $argv 0]

spawn telnet $cellmember 5555

expect {

  -re (HP.*)INET { puts "$cellmember: $expect_out(1,string)" }

  timeout { puts "$cellmember: timeout" }

  eof { puts "$cellmember: some other problem" }

}

In other words, this script will check the computer listed on the command line and print out either:

• the version of Data Protector installed on the client
• a timeout if there was no response in 30 seconds
• a dumb message if something else went wrong (e.g. name resolution failure)

Feel free to use this if you find it useful.

Greg Baker is an independent consultant who happens to do a lot of work on HPE DataProtector. He is the author of the only published books on HP Data Protector (http://www.ifost.org.au/books/#dp). He works with HPE and HPE partner companies to solve the hardest big-data problems (especially around backup). See more at IFOST's DataProtector pages at http://www.ifost.org.au/dataprotector, or visit the online store for Data Protector products, licenses and renewals at http://store.data-protector.net/ 

How to save on your HPE Support Contract

Enterprise support contracts are usually 20% of the list price (original software purchase price) each year. HPE is no exception, except that HPE internally have rules preventing them from discounting the support contract. So even if you get a deep discount for your initial purchase, you will still be paying 20% of whatever it would have been listed at.

Most Data Protector customers have had Data Protector for a long time. Many of my customers are just starting to head into their third decade of using it, so their support contract has probably cost 4-5 times as much as the initial licenses.

Support contract costs add up. Here's how to save on it:

KILL THE ZOMBIES! Confirm that all the products that you are renewing are still in use in your organisation. A lot of cruft can appear in a support contract. In particular, count up the number of online extension licenses and media agent licenses.

THE TIER DROP If you have had Data Protector for a while, you might have bought a cell manager license for HP-UX or Solaris, but you are now running it on Windows or Linux. The license will work, but you will be paying 3 times as much for it each year in renewal. Switching to a Linux or Windows cell manager can give a return on investment of 18 months.

ORACLE DROP Nearly as often, you might have bought a license for an online backup of Oracle on an HP-UX or Solaris box, but you have migrated your Oracle databases to run on Linux. Again, switching to a lower-tier integration license will pay itself off in less than 18 months.

RESTORE ONLY If you aren't using Data Protector that much any more, and you only have to perform restores -- but you still want to be supported, then Data Protector single-server edition is the cheapest support-contract-enabled product you can buy.

RETREAT ON THE ADVANCED BACKUP TO DISK LICENSES If you were using Data Protector before 6.21, you might have been using File Libraries, and you would have had enough licenses to cover the full size of your backup. With StoreOnce stores, the de-duplication will often mean that you only need a small fraction of what you were using before.

SWITCH CLASSIC TO CAPACITY If you have very little data but you do many integration backups: for example, you have dozens of SQL databases, are using VMware, but only have around 10TB of data, capacity licenses work out cheaper.

SWITCH CAPACITY TO CLASSIC This is very common situation for newer customers. You might have been sold a capacity license -- possibly at 90% discount -- and when you come up to renewal, you pay more in annual support renewal (20%) than the original license cost! When you add up the licenses for the functionality that you are actually using, it's often cheaper to buy classic licenses afresh.

CONSOLIDATE TO ONE CONTRACT Sometimes I find customers who thought they were supported who discover that only a part of their contract was renewed, or only one of two was renewed. This can lead to an expensive back-to-current renewal.

Anyway, if you want some help with this, send me a copy of your support contract (gregb@ifost.org.au) and let me look through it. I've seen enough of them to make sense of them now. (You can also request this online: http://store.data-protector.net/products/support-contract-review -- use the discount code "FREE-REVIEW")

Greg Baker is an independent consultant who happens to do a lot of work on HP DataProtector. He is the author of the only published books on HP Data Protector (http://www.ifost.org.au/books/#dp). He works with HP and HP partner companies to solve the hardest big-data problems (especially around backup). See more at IFOST's DataProtector pages at http://www.ifost.org.au/dataprotector, or visit the online store for Data Protector products, licenses and renewals at http://store.data-protector.net/ 

Please write a review

To everyone who downloaded a copy of any of my Data Protector books last week when I put them on special -- thank you! It was a very nice birthday surprise to take out #3, #4 and #5 positions simultaneously in Amazon's Business Software books.

If you found any of those books helpful, don't forget to leave a review: even just leaving a number-of-stars rating helps me work out what to focus on.

And if you missed out, you can buy them (they aren't very expensive even when they aren't on special) at http://www.ifost.org.au/books

Data Protector media agent licenses

There are two licensing models:

• Classic licensing (which is far more common)
• Capacity-based licensing

If you are using the newer capacity-based licensing, then you can use any HPE Data Protector functionality that you want. If you are using Classic licensing (which is what almost every customer has), then you pay individually for different components.

For example, you pay a license for each tape drive you want to have concurrently writing. When you buy the cell manager license, you get the right to run one tape drive; if you want more you need to buy additional media agent licenses.

Otherwise, you will get error messages like this:

[61:17102] Not enough licenses "Direct attached tape drive for Windows / NetWare / Linux".

Or like this:

[61:17102]  Not enough licenses "Tape drive for SAN / all platforms". Session is waiting for some of devices to get free.

If you are encountering this, you can get a super-quick quote on licensing at this online store.

Greg Baker is an independent consultant who happens to do a lot of work on HP DataProtector. He is the author of the only published books on HP Data Protector (http://www.ifost.org.au/books/#dp). He works with HP and HP partner companies to solve the hardest big-data problems (especially around backup). See more at IFOST's DataProtector pages at http://www.ifost.org.au/dataprotector, or visit the online store for Data Protector products, licenses and renewals athttp://store.data-protector.net/ 

Data Protector licenses available for purchase online

In what I think is a first for HPE -- certainly in Australia! -- you don't need to go through a traditional sales channel to buy additional Data Protector licenses any more.

All prices are in AUD -- convert them into your currency to see how cost effective buying through http://store.data-protector.net/ is.

Celebratory 100th blog post - what people have actually been reading, and what freebies and junkets are on offer

This is the 100th blog post, and the counter of page views is about to tick over 50,000. Thank you for your readership!

According to Google's infallible stats counters, here's what most people have been reading on this blog:

POEMS At the end of a day of being a computer nerd, you need something that will make you laugh (or at least smile) and also make you look cultured among your friends. Nobody else writes poetry about nuclear physics or time travel, so if you want to get that "I'm so hip" feel, you really should buy a copy of When Medusa went on Chatroulette for $3 (more or less, depending on your country of origin).

NAVIGATOR - If you run Data Protector then you will definitely get some value out of the cloud-hosted Navigator trial. You can get reports like "what virtual machines are not getting backed up?" and "how big will my backups be next year?" -- stuff that makes you look like the storage genius guru (which you probably are anyway, but this just makes it easier to prove it).

HOW LONG WILL IT TAKE - If you are tracking your work in Atlassian's fabulous JIRA task tracking system, then try out my free plug-in (x.ifost.org.au/aeed) which can predict how long tasks will take to complete. And if you are not using JIRA, then convince everyone to throw out whatever you are using and switch to JIRA because it's an order of magnitude cheaper, and also easier to support.

TRAINING COURSES - You can now buy training online from store.data-protector.net -- and it appears that it's 10-20% cheaper than buying from HPE directly in most countries. There are options for instructor-led, self-paced, over-the-internet and e-learning modules.

SUPPORT CONTRACTS -  Just email your support contract before its renewal to gregb@ifost.org.au and I'll look at it and figure out a way to make it cheaper for you.

BOOKS - If you are just learning Data Protector, then buy one of my books on Data Protector (available in Kindle, PDF and hardback). They are all under $10; you can hide them in an expense report and no-one will ever know.

Stumped by a customer question today: when to replace a cleaning tape

It was an innocent enough question: "when will I need to replace this cleaning tape?"

And I realised that not only did I not know the answer, that in fact, I'd never replaced a cleaning tape in 20+ years of backup work. Sure, I've put one in when I've been deploying a system, but I tend to forget about it after that.

Estimates from drive manufacturers suggest that a tape should be cleaned every month. Looking at backup logs, it looks like tape drives request cleaning about every 6 months.

But that data is mostly from tape drives that are inside a tape library, so the amount of dust getting in and out will be less than for a standalone tape drive.

The spec sheet on HPE's universal LTO ultrium cleaning kit suggests that it should be good for between 15 and 50 cleans.

Put together, that means that a cleaning tape should be replaced somewhere between once every year or so and every quarter century, which is not very helpful!

I believe the data from the tape drives themselves reporting "I'm dirty" rather than the vendor suggestions, so even taking the low end of the HPE spec sheet, a cleaning tape in a tape library should be good for 7 years. Since that's enough for at least two generations of tape technology to come and go, it's probably safe to assume that you will have bought a new tape library in that time.

But if you have multiple tape drives, and it has been a couple of years since you last replaced the cleaning tape, errm, maybe it's worth buying one. I'm not selling tapes at store.data-protector.net yet, so my best suggestion is this vendor on Amazon: LTO ultrium cleaning kit.

Incidentally, if you do have a tape library and you are running HPE Data Protector, then you will almost definitely want to sign up for the free cloud-hosted Backup Navigator trial here: Free Backup Navigator Trial at HPE so that you can see which are your most unreliable tape drives -- perhaps they need cleaning!

Greg Baker is an independent consultant who happens to do a lot of work on HP DataProtector. He is the author of the only published books on HP Data Protector (http://www.ifost.org.au/books/#dp). He works with HP and HP partner companies to solve the hardest big-data problems (especially around backup). See more at IFOST's DataProtector pages at http://www.ifost.org.au/dataprotector, or visit the online store for Data Protector products, licenses and renewals athttp://store.data-protector.net/ 

Data Protector reporting - the free hosted trial - sessions by session status

Report-of-the-day from Backup Navigator: what percentage of your backups are completing successfully?

HPE are running a free offer at the moment that you really, really want to take up. If you are running Data Protector, and you would like to get some insight into your backup environment, then Backup Navigator is the product that you want to buy.

Navigator generates reports -- beautiful reports -- that tell you everything from the basic and simple, through to the utterly awesome.

Backup Navigator is designed to run either in your own data centre (where it will use the Data Protector protocols to talk to your cell manager) or it can be hosted elsewhere (and you install a small agent that talks to the Navigator server via HTTPS).

To show customers how amazing it is, HPE are offering a three month trial. HPE already have the Navigator server in place. You just need to install the Navigator agent on a Windows or Linux box in your cell somewhere.  (It doesn't even have to be the cell manager, so you probably don't even need to raise a change control for it.)

No credit card or purchase order or commitment. HPE appear to be pretty confident that you'll like what you get! Sign up for it here: http://engage.hpe.com/Reg_NavTrial_Blog