NAS device replication may not be a real option.  The initial seed still
has to transfer all of the data.  Assuming a T1 operating at 1.5Mbits per
second, it would take at least 14,814 hours (about 2 years) to transfer
10TBytes.

You may consider shipping a SAS attached LTO5 tape drive with a small form
factor (mini ITX MB) PC.

at remote site
- Backup locally to encrypted LTO5 media
- Backup the TSM server DB to LTO5 media
- Ship the encrypted tapes to the home office
- ship the TSM server and tape drive to the next remote office and repeat

at home office
- Perform a TSM server recovery at the home office
- export/replicate remote client data to primary TSM server
- point remote client to primary TSM server which is now seeded with
remote client data


LTO5 is less expensive than 10TB of JBOD and probably what you use at the
home office and can be easily encrypted and shipped.

Small form factor headless PC is less expensive than laptop and can be
managed remotely. All you need is someone to plug it into the ethernet,
attach the tape drive and swap tapes when requested.

Faster turnaround since the travelling TSM server(s) only returns to the
home office when all remote site backups are complete.

Thank You,
Neil Strand



From:   Bill Boyer <bjdboyer AT COMCAST DOT NET>
To:     ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU,
Date:   01/16/2013 01:04 PM
Subject:        Re: [ADSM-L] TSM 1st full backup of remote low-bandwidth
nodes
Sent by:        "ADSM: Dist Stor Manager" <ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU>



Have you looked at replication of those remote sites as opposed to backup
of
the sites directly?

For those sites that could use a storage replication device to replace the
file server (Netapp, Data Domain,...) and replicate it to possibly a
central
or hub sites. Then back up from there? Replace the file server with a NAS
CIFS device and let it do the replication. If you use a solution like
Netapp, snapshots can even be your backup solution for the site.

Possibly "cloud" solutions. An example could be CarbonCopy and DATTO. Just
to name them as examples as opposed to recommending those specific
products.

Or (and I can't believe I'm going to suggest this!) Microsoft DFS
replication.

Just some other thoughts on the subject....

Bill

-----Original Message-----
From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On Behalf Of
Bent Christensen
Sent: Wednesday, January 16, 2013 11:25 AM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: Re: [ADSM-L] TSM 1st full backup of remote low-bandwidth nodes

Andy,

I do not totally agree with you here.

The main issue for us is to get all 107 remote sites converted to TSM
reasonably fast to save maintenance and service fees on the existing
backup
solutions. With the laptop server solution we predict the turn-around time
for each laptop to be around 2 weeks, which includes sending the laptop to
the remote site, back up all data, send the laptop back to the backup
center, export the node. With say 10 laptops this will take at least 6
months. We could buy more laptops but we cannot charge the expenses to the
remote sites, and we are stuck with the laptops afterwards ...

Disaster restores is a very different ball game. Costs will not be a big
issue and we have approved plans for recovering any remote site within 48
hours, which for a few sites includes chartering an aircraft to transport
hardware and a technician.

 - Bent



-----Original Message-----
From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On Behalf Of
Huebner, Andy
Sent: Tuesday, January 15, 2013 5:17 PM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: Re: [ADSM-L] TSM 1st full backup of remote low-bandwidth nodes

You should use the same method to seed the first backup as you plan to use
to restore the data.
When you look at it that way a laptop and big external drive is not that
expensive.


Andy Huebner

-----Original Message-----
From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On Behalf Of
Bent Christensen
Sent: Tuesday, January 15, 2013 9:37 AM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: [ADSM-L] TSM 1st full backup of remote low-bandwidth nodes

Hi,

We are starting up a backup consolidation project where we are going to
implement TSM 6.3 clients in all our 100+ remote sites and having them
back
up over the WAN to a few well-placed TSM backup datacenters.

We have been through similar projects with selected sites a few times
before, but this time the sites are larger and the bandwidth/latency
worse,
so there is little room for configuration mishaps ;-)

One question always pops up early in the process: How are we going to do
the
first full TSM backup of the remote site nodes?
So far we have tried:

 - copy data from the new node (include all attributes and permissions) to
USB-disks, mount those on a TSM server (as drive X) and do a 'dsmc incr
\\newnode\z$ -snapshotroot=X:\newnode_zdrive -asnodename=newnode'. This
works OK and only requires a bunch of cheap high capacity USB disks, but
our
experience is that when we afterwards do the first incremental backup of
the
new node then 20-40 % of the files get backed up again - and we can't
figure
out why.

- build a temp TSM laptop server, send it to the remote site, direct first
full backup to this server, send it back to the backup datacenter and
export
the node(s). Nice and easy, but requires a lot of expensive laptops (and
USB
disks, the remote sites typically contain 2 to 10 TB of file data) to
finish
the project in a reasonable time frame.

So how are you guys doing the first full backup of a remote node when
using
the WAN is not an option?

 - Bent