So far DPM 2007 with SP1 works well with Firestreamer Media Changer 3.95.8. It acts like a fake/virtual tape library with 5 drives and 200 tape slots. Those “tapes” can be anything that accepts native windows storage… USB, local drives, CIFS network locations, etc. We’re using a small NAS as the endpoint, and the Filestreamer interface lets you create tape files of any size, which will look/act like tapes in one of the 200 tape slots inside the DPM interface. This allows you “operational” backups on DPM disk and long term “Disaster Recovery” backups that are pushed over the LAN to somewhere else. Perfect.
So far I’ve had one error.
The number of free tapes in the Tape Library Firestreamer Media Changer is less than or equals the threshold value of 40. You must add tape to the library and mark it as free in order to prevent future backups from failing. (ID 3305)
If you get an error about free tape threshold, be aware that DPM seems to have a fixed “free tape” threshold of 20%. On the Firestreamer Media Changer, since it has 200 tape slots, that number is 40. The error in DPM itself isn’t an issue assuming you have planned out how many tape file you need (and what size to make them), but if you want to keep your alerts screen clean, be sure to add enough virtual tapes to Firestreamer so that it never dips below 40 free.
Great post for those of us wondering if we can get around the warning. I guess I will have to make my tapes smaller and just make more of them
Thanks!
Great solution… though mine is a sticky one, I cant actually get DPM to give me the library tag (You know the one next to Agents and Disks once you click Management in the admin console)… i.e. I dont believe DPM is seeing that I have Firestreamer running. Is there anywhere I should configure DPM to tell it I have a tape device attached ? Any guidance would be much appreciated.