Earth to EMC NetWorker Engineering: Wake Up

I don’t like having to do this, particularly since I’m on holidays and only logged into my work email to send one, rather than read, but I noticed an email come in on a support case that I’ve been keenly dealing with, and wanted to check what the latest update from EMC on it was.

But on this case, I’ve been passed a response from EMC NetWorker engineering which is so boneheaded and stupid that I can’t help but have a short rant about it.

(I’ll qualify one thing here: I’m talking EMC NetWorker engineering – the back-end people, not the support people.)

In short, as of 7.6, there’s a new media database field called ‘validcopies’, which, according to the man page is:

The number of successful copies (instances or clones) of the save set, all with the same save time and save set identifier.

Now, digging a little bit further, we’ve got the release notes for 7.6, which states:

mminfo changed to allow query for valid save set copies in order to prevent data loss

There was no convenient method to query for save sets with valid clone copies on other volumes using mminfo. This made certain tasks more difficult to perform, such as determining if space could be cleared on the EDLs.

(Italicised emphasis mine, bold from the release notes.)

Now, in addition to validcopies initially being entirely FUBAR as a reporting mechanism (I’m happy with the patch I’ve been testing, and I’m hoping it will get into the first service pack for 7.6), I noted in the support case that I didn’t think it was appropriate for NetWorker to return 2 ‘validcopies’ for savesets on ADV_FILE devices. (I.e., one for the read-only volume, one for the read-write volume.) Sure, in the classic use of the ‘copies’ flag, we’re used to this, but ‘validcopies’, being something new, and being about preventing data loss, should have only reported 1 valid copy per entire disk backup unit, not 2.

Instead, EMC NetWorker engineering have adamantly said that it will report 2 valid copies per disk backup unit, 1 per read-only device, one per read-write device.

This is boneheaded. If the validcopies flag is all about preventing data loss, then it must be accurate as to the number of distinct, usable copies.

If engineering is so confident that a backup to ADV_FILE represents two distinct valid copies for the purposes of preventing data loss if a copy is lost, let’s see them delete a whole bunch of uncloned savesets from the read-write ADV_FILE devices on EMC’s production backups and then recover. What? You can’t do that? But you said you had two valid copies, and you only deleted one of them? Boo-hoo to you too.

I’ll end my grumpy rant with the following advice: don’t say or do something stupid that might allow a customer to do something stupid that might result in data loss. Haven’t you read this, after all?

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