Archiving from SnapLock volumes to Tape via Commvault - Best Practices

[Jerry2]

Hi all,

we are designing an archiving workflow and we’d like to get your advice on the best practices from the NetApp perspective.

Our source is a NetApp ONTAP cluster with SnapLock volumes (WORM). The target is a remote LTO tape library (WORM media) managed by Commvault. The goal is long-term retention (10+ years).

From an ONTAP performance and stability standpoint, does it make sense to use a staging disk for the initial backup and then move it to tape, or have you seen better results with other workflows? Also, considering the data is immutable, would you recommend a "Clean Archive" approach to minimize reads from the SnapLock volumes, or are there benefits to periodic full reads for data integrity checks?

Any insights would be greatly appreciated!

[FelixZhou]

We use VERITAS NetBackup for our NetApp data backup and archiving. Using the disk pool for staging as you mentioned for better back up performance. it is called lifecycle policy on NetBackup. Basically data will be backed up to disk pool for short term then move to tapes.

[Jerry2]

Hi @FelixZhou , thank you so much for sharing your experience. I do appreciate it.

Indeed, In NetBackup, the staging disk is usually needed for such a setup. Unfortunately, neither Netbackup/Commvault nor Netapp provides a detailed description of Archiving from SnapLock volumes to Tape use case.