You can do inline copy of tapes as you
write them (assuming you have enough drives). That is what we do for our ~8TB
Production database (or to be more exact what we do for backup of the EMC BCV
snap we do every day.
Our Prod database is on EMC Symmetrix.
Each night we do a BCV Synch to copy the database differences over from primary
to BCV disks. Once the sync is done we “split” the BCVs and mount
the BCV volumes to our NBU master server. (We put Oracle in “hot backup”
mode 6 nights a week and do a “cold backup” with Oracle down once a
week.) The backup started on these volumes does 2 copies of each stream at
the same time. This process takes about 18-20 hours so we’re preparing
to add more streams (we’re migrating most other backups to Data Domain
de-dupe devices installed late last year).
It works fairly well most of the time –
we can send tapes offsite pretty much the minute the backup completes. On the
downside is that NBU (6.0 MP4) doesn’t seem to deal with all failures of
in line copies well so on occasion only one of the two copies for a given
stream will be made. We’re hoping this is fixed in 6.5.
Of course you can always just run
bpduplicate from a script to do what you want instead. Your script would make
the decisions about what to do when.
From: veritas-bu-bounces AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
[mailto:veritas-bu-bounces AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu] On Behalf Of Nathan Kippen
Sent: Thursday, March 06, 2008
2:08 PM
To:
veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
Subject: [Veritas-bu] Looking for
suggestions vaulting/duplication-related
I'm looking for suggestions on possible ways to solve a dilemma:
I have a requirement to back up two 12TB databases daily to disk and
create a 2nd copy on tape to send offsite 5 days/week. Also once a
month I'll be required to make a 3rd copy on tape to send to a different
offsite location.
I'm currently backing up each database in a separate policy and each
policy has about 10 streams running from 4 hours to just over 12
hours; these backups start @ 18:00. Because it would be pretty
much impossible to have 2nd copies created and ready to send offsite the
following day by noon, we've been given an extra day to send them offsite.
The problem is I don't want to wait until the last stream is finished
before I begin to vault, because I'm wasting time waiting. Also
if I start my vaulting about 8 - 10 hours after the backups have
started, I miss grabbing the last couple of streams that take greater than
10 hours to backup.
So instead of vaulting I was thinking of manually duplicating
streams as they finish; thus I could duplicate as soon as a stream
finished, and I wouldn't be preventing my vault from running other vault
jobs.
(I have other vaults that need to run, but unfortunately only have
1 library that can do the vaulting.)
Any suggestions on how to automate the duplication of each stream as it
finishes? My other problem is during the weekend in addition to
the two 12TB databases, I have another 70TB to backup and try to vault and
get offsite Tuesday morning. I have 4 media servers and 63 drives to help
me.
One thing that has helped is that I've stopped vaulting tape
backups. I just vault backups that have backed up to disk.
