We have 8 Clariion VTL's and have a retention period of a week for everything. We use In Line Tape copy for weekly and monthly backups for offside storage. We are looking to use SRDF to replicate these VTL's, but this may just take too long.

-----Original Message-----
From: veritas-bu-bounces AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu [mailto:veritas-bu-bounces AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu] On Behalf Of briandiven AT northwesternmutual DOT com
Sent: 24 July 2007 12:26 PM
To: jpiszcz AT lucidpixels DOT com
Cc: enyamada AT gmail DOT com; simon.weaver AT astrium.eads DOT net; Veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu; liddles AT amgen DOT com
Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] Maximum number of policies

We get around 6-8 restore requests/day.  And yes, I take advantage of Inline Tape Copy and have a copy available across dark fiber at a separate campus and the other copy vaulted 90 miles away.  If we have time, I rerun (or dupe) any status 84's we get.  I'm using IBM for tape
- 3590's and 3592's in a 3494 ATL, but just brought in a TS3500 which is supported behind a VTL. The 3592's are reliable beyond any tape drive I have seen in my life - however the 3590's are about on par with any other technology.

-----Original Message-----
From: Justin Piszcz [mailto:jpiszcz AT lucidpixels DOT com]
Sent: Tuesday, July 24, 2007 3:56 AM
To: DIVEN, BRIAN
Cc: cpreston AT glasshouse DOT com; liddles AT amgen DOT com; enyamada AT gmail DOT com; simon.weaver AT astrium.eads DOT net; Veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
Subject: RE: [Veritas-bu] Maximum number of policies



On Tue, 24 Jul 2007, briandiven AT northwesternmutual DOT com wrote:

> For those of you that are seriously interested, here is the actual
format taking advantage of policy and schedule names that made our life
easier.  I should also state that we stood up extremely well to 5 audits
over the past 4 years (BCP/vaulting audit, internal audit regarding
records retention, backup audit, internal SOX, and external SOX audit).
>
> Policy name example:
>
> Sybase-alderaan-PDS_SY24-model-DB ... Which tells me this is a sybase
DB on physical host alderaan on database server PDS_SY24 for the model
database instance and that this policy is a DB backup (vs. a log).
>
> Our audit requirements are for 30 and 90 day retentions and we send
all databases less than 25 GB to a D2D pool.  To accomplish this, we use
the schedule name.
>
> Schedule name example (There are 2 automatic backup schedules and 4
application backup schedules per policy):
>
> Automatic Backup Name:  PDS_SY24+model+30day+DB+tape+1 and
PDS_SY24+model+90day+DB+tape+1 ... Which tells me database/instance, the
retention, that it's a DB backup, destined for tape with 1 stripe.
>
> The key here is that we have a single script to maintain for the whole
environment, because it has all of the information to parse.  The DB
team is required to keep a table of all databases and whether they are
active or not and how big they are.  We activate/deactive/create
policies based on their table and the script determines whether they
should go to disk or tape based on the size.
>
> Application Backup Name:  There are 4 of them, 30day-tape, 30day-disk,
90day-tape, and 90day-disk.
>
> I would also add that rerunning failed backups is one thing, but what
about a backup that never runs?  It doesn't show up on a failed rerun
script.  Part of the summary reports show databases that haven't had a
backup in "X" number of days so we catch those too.  Now the onus of the
audit is on the database teams to keep their table current and it is a
very well documented, specific, and verifiable process.  I wrote my own
SLA's at a 95% backup success rate and 100% restore success rate and
haven't missed them for 2 years now.

How often do you perform restores?  What types of tape medium do you
use?  What robots are in use?

I find 100% restoration rate very nice; however, how do you achieve
that, I assume you have two copies of most pieces of data as mentioned
above 30/90 days?

Justin.

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