There is a new technote entitled "Best Practices for using Storage Lifecycle Policies in NetBackup 6.5.3 and 6.5.4". This essential document, authored by engineering, support and product management, documents best practices, and is based on consolidated information obtained from real world experiences.

If you are planning to implements SLPs or already have, becoming familiar with the suggestions in the documents will allow you to both tune your systems for your workload and gain insight into the current state of your lifecycles.

If you aren't familiar with Storage Lifecycle Policies, also known as SLP's, they are one of the more innovative approaches I've seen in the last few years for to allow a user to describe a life cycle for a backup data, without creating complex nests of overlapping schedules. If you aren't familiar with SLPs you can read more in the white paper entitled, “NetBackup Disk Based Data Protection Options”. We’ve been refining and improving SLPs since their original release in 6.5 and we've got more enhancements coming in the next few releases, so stay tuned.