Re: [Networker] Sungard DR testing
2007-07-27 10:12:01
On Jul 27, 2007, at 8:36 AM, Jon Fraley wrote:
We are currently looking at using Sungard for DR purposes. I was
wondering if anyone could share their experiences with Sungard in
recovering the Networker server. Since the testing time is
allocated in
8 hour slots, how long does it normally take to recover the
server? How
do you get much more in than the Netwoker recovery? We are
currently on
7.2.2 running on Linux.
John, we use Sungard here at Temple for our mainframe DR and also a
few other servers such as our LDAP farm, email, and www.temple.edu.
Due to the cost involved, we don't keep a spare NetWorker server at
Sungard, but we do keep it and the majority of our backup media off-
site (a few blocks away from our primary data center). If we lose our
primary computer room, we will not lose our NetWorker server unless
there is some sort of nuclear holocaust!
There is no way anyone on this list can provide you with specific
details without more information. For example, how large are your
NetWorker server's media and client file indexes and how many clients
would you need to recover at Sungard? The more metadata your
NetWorker server manages, the more time recovering it to a standby
NetWorker server it will take. How fast is your disk storage and tape
drives at Sungard and your Sungard NetWorker server?
Although I can't give you specific numbers, I can tell you one thing
that's of critical importance for your employer's business
continuity. You need to know how long it takes to deploy critical
servers and put them in production if they blow up, flood, are
stolen, or a serious hardware problem occurs. Don't go by any numbers
you get on this list; you have to do good testing to see for
yourself. You need to do a full blown DR rehearsal at least once a
year for each critical server. Sungard will also make you pay for
this service.
We do DR drills several times a year. In any given week, we recover
at least one critical server to a DR server (usually not at Sungard
though) and our success rate hovers around 99%! Like many
organizations, we get audited for our DR practices, so we are careful
to make sure things work during an audit. My trick is to tell those
who are about to be audited to do the DR drill a few days before the
audit to make sure it works and that they understand the process.
Amongst other things, my job is to make sure our NetWorker server and
the required resources are available for these audits. Doing practice
DR drills isn't always practical, but if possible, encourage it.
In fact, I will be involved with our next mainframe DR rehearsal at
Temple's Sungard site in a few weeks to learn how our mainframe DR
works; we do this sort of thing a few times a year. Past experience
says it takes 12 hours for us to migrate to one of Sungard's
mainframes and test the migration, but that may be totally different
in your situation and our timing should improve considerably with
this next DR rehearsal because we will be testing new backup media.
Depending on your situation, you might be better off with a disk-to-
disk replication solution to replicate your NetWorker server's
metadata to storage at Sungard instead of relying on recovering the
data from tape when a DR situation develops. Even for a small
NetWorker server, it can take several hours to migrate the metadata
to a different server. A NetWorker server with 20GB worth of
metadata will take a lot less time to recover then one with 200GB,
but you can also pick and chose which clients' metadata you recover
after you recover your media database.
I am working on a project now where we are transitioning Temple's IBM
mainframe backups (payroll, student grades, accounts payable,
financial management, etc.) from old IBM mainframe tape cartridges to
a virtual tape library. That VTL tape library sits in the same room
as our mainframe, but its data gets replicated to our Sungard daily.
We have not tested this yet, but that test is the one I will be
watching in a few weeks. We tried doing this test last month at
Sungard and it failed miserably through no fault of our own, so we
will be doing it again soon!
My role in this project is to back up our mainframe VTL via NetWorker
to LTO-3 media for off-site storage for five years and to know how
the entire mainframe backup process works. I doubt we'll need to
recover NetWorker tapes at Sungard simply because we rsync the VTL
data to Sungard daily, which is also what we do with all the other DR
servers we have there.
--
Stan Horwitz
Temple University
Enterprise Systems Group
stan AT temple DOT edu
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