If there is one lesson that I can give to everyone in the Networker
(especially Academic) world, it's this one:
YOUR DISASTER WILL HAPPEN ONE DAY.
Nobody thinks that it will happen to them. When the disaster does
happen, and you have over 200+ servers to restore, someone has to be the
broker, or deal maker, on who gets restored 1st. If you aren't careful,
you will have a bunch of Professors, or Chancellor types all saying that
they should go first.
And I agree with Stan - Please make sure that you have the appropriate
Software (CD's/manuals/whatever) to do a bare metal restore. Nothing
prepares you for the real experience.
I also agree with Stan with regards to charging customers for their
licenses, and making them responsible for their own restores. We make
sure that the jobs run, that the tape drives (library) function
properly, and that the tapes are available for restores. This includes
200+ clients, 35 SQL servers, and about 20 Exchange servers. You will
drive yourself crazy if you don't push some of the responsibility back
to the server admins.
David M. Browning Jr.
LSUHSC Enterprise Network Operations/Help Desk
(504) 654-7520 (Blackberry Phone Number)
(504) 398-1444 Direct (Temp New Orleans number)
(504) 914-7550 - Cell
-----Original Message-----
From: Legato NetWorker discussion [mailto:NETWORKER AT LISTSERV.TEMPLE DOT EDU]
Sent: Wednesday, December 07, 2005 12:10 PM
To: NETWORKER AT LISTSERV.TEMPLE DOT EDU
Subject: Re: [Networker] What ARE the rules?
On Dec 7, 2005, at 12:41 PM, David Mingia wrote:
> We are just implementing Legato as a backup scheme to replace
> Veritas and
> are questioning how and why we are delivering the backup services we
> provide to our small private college. Any colleges out there
> willing to
> share what you do for your customers and why you do what you do?
> Legal
> requirements? Customer service requirements?
>
> I am resisting setting up a scheme simply because that is the way
> we have
> always done it.
Unless you are backing up computers that you or others in your group
directly manage, avoid assuming complete responsibility for the
integrity of each night's backups. What we do here is require that
each system administrator who has a system that's backed up to the
central NetWorker complex that I manage be the first point of
responsibility for ensuring that their data is backed up and can be
restored. Unless you are familiar with the data you are backing up,
do not assume full responsibilty that the backups work.
What we do in my group is tell our users (i.e., individual systems
managers) that they must do periodic recover tests. We strongly
encourage people to do at least one bare metal restore a year per
server where ever possible. Those of us who manage our NetWorker
server are here to make sure that the server is available for backups
and restores, as well as monitor the nightly backups, but we never
promise that data can be recovered unless its data that we directly
manage.
For the past few years, we would add on a new backup client without a
charge. Now, each new client connection slot that gets used requires
a fee. In fact, we just started that process within the past two
weeks and I simply tell people to order the number of client
connections they need from our reseller. We're at around 220 clients
(a mixture of Windows, Solaris, Linux, Mac OS X, and Tru64 Unix) and
we are working on a proposal now to back up the data on our old IBM
mainframe to our NetWorker complex.
You also need to have reasonable expectations established with how
fast data can be recovered and how you would deal with a disaster.
How this is done depends heavily on the needs of your users and
management.
One thing we have been deficient here is to set up a service level
agreement for each system we back up. We have these SLA's verbally
and informally, which has been very effective, but I would like to
put it all down in writing. Unfortunately, for various reasons
outside of my control, that hasn't happened.
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