Chapter 3 - Understanding Spectra Advanced Bucket
Management Concepts
Special Considerations for Reading Tapes in a Non-
BlackPearl Environment
S
PECIAL
C
ONSIDERATIONS FOR
R
EADING
T
APES IN A
N
ON
-B
LACK
P
EARL
E
NVIRONMENT
The BlackPearl system stores data on LTO-5 or later generation Ultrium, or TS11
xx
technology tape media using the LTFS format. If you plan to eject tapes and read them in a
non-BlackPearl system, you must follow the guidelines for
as well as the guidelines below when configuring your storage
domains and data policies.
• The LTFS file name option must be set to
Object Name
when configuring a storage
domain. This setting configures LTFS file names to use the format {
bucket name
}/{
object
name
}, for example bucket1/video1.mov. If the tapes are ejected from the BlackPearl
system and loaded into a non-BlackPearl system, the file names match the object names.
If you do not configure this option, object names are assigned a UUID string, which is
not human readable.
• Object names must comply with LTFS file naming rules:
• The colon character (:) is not allowed in LTFS file names and therefore not allowed
in BlackPearl object names. The slash character (/) is also technically not allowed
in LTFS file names; however, the BlackPearl software can accommodate a slash in
the object name and translates it as a directory in the LTFS file system (for
example, directory1/directory2/video1.mov).
• Directory names have a limit of 255 characters.
• File names have a variable character limit. If you are using English ASCII
characters, the limit is 1024 characters. If you are using a graphical language, such
as Japanese, the limit is 512 characters.
• Spectra Logic does not recommend the following characters in LTFS file names or
BlackPearl object names for reasons of cross-platform compatibility: control
characters such as carriage return (CR) and line feed (LF), double quotation mark
(“), asterisk (*), question mark (?), less than sign (<), greater than sign (>), backslash
(\), forward slash (/) vertical line (|).
•
Blobbing Enabled
should be cleared when configuring a data policy. Blobbing allows an
object larger than 1 TB to be broken into multiple blobs and then stored on multiple
tapes. Tapes created with blobbing disabled are always readable by a non-BlackPearl
system; tapes created with blobbing enabled may not be readable by a non-BlackPearl
system. With blobbing disabled, all files must have a size of 1 TB or less.
• The
Keep Latest
setting cannot be used for a data policy which uses a storage domain
configured with the
LTFS File Name
option set to
Object Name
.
November 2020
User Guide-BlackPearl Converged Storage System
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