I am looking to add 4 more drives to my 6 drive LTO-5 library. Every policy is using SLP to handle the duplication from disk to tape. The problem we are having now is the backlog of duplication jobs waiting to get to a tape drive.
Looking through the documentation, it mentions something to the effect that if maximum concurrent write drives is set to one less than the physical number of drives, the other tape drive will be available for restores and other non-backup operations (for example, to import, to verify and to duplicate backups).
My question is about the "duplicate backups" part. If SLP is to be the only thing accessing the tape drives, will it use the 9 drives I set, or the 1 drive I didn't?
My reasoning behind leaving the 1 drive of 10 out of the loop with the max concurrent write setting is for the sake of cataloging and restores. Will this idea work? Will giving Catalog/VaultCatalog its own drive (sort of) get anything out of sync if there are still duplication jobs running or queued?
We are running 7.6.0.3 on Windows.
Thank you for your input.