Vaulting

Vaulting is a mechanism that involves moving tapes that contained backed-up data outside of the tape library and storing them in some safe location. The location can either be local to the data center or can be a remote location. The offsite location can also come from a third-party vendor. Administrators usually opt for vaulting due to the following reasons:

• To protect tapes containing crucial backup data from a disaster (such as an earthquake or a fire) that may affect a given location.
• If the backup data needs to be protected for a couple of weeks/months/years based on retention criteria then instead of keeping the tapes in the tape library, they are moved outside of the library and stored locally or remotely.
• For regulatory and other compliance reasons, certain data needs to be retained for extended periods of time.

Administrators might also want to keep tapes containing backup data outside a library at a local location for a couple of weeks, so they can serve any restore requests immediately and then send them off-site to retain them for a couple of months or years. Some administrators may also need to move tapes to different remote locations one after another.

Based on the above criteria, a media management system should have ways to track the following:

• What data is on which tape
• Which tape is sent to which location, and for how long
• How to bring a tape back to the main location to fulfill certain restore requirements
• How to trigger the rotation of tapes among different sites and then back to the library
• How to select which media to move to an offsite location and apply a retention period

Modern tapes are tracked by their bar code numbers, also known as serial numbers. This makes it easier to figure out where a particular tape with a particular serial number is stored.

CA ARCserve achieves all these things and more through the Media Management Administrator interface. It also provides a command line interface (ca_mmo) to achieve the same.

The following sections talk about how the system can be used to fulfill the above requirements.

Note: To use all these features of MMO (Media Management Option), the Enterprise Option must be installed.