ADSM-L

Re: Keeping an handle on client systems' large drives

2002-06-17 11:27:28
Subject: Re: Keeping an handle on client systems' large drives
From: "Prather, Wanda" <Wanda.Prather AT JHUAPL DOT EDU>
Date: Mon, 17 Jun 2002 11:25:13 -0400
I'm assuming here you want to be able to restore the backupset locally,
OFFLINE from the TSM server.  (Restoring a backupset across the network is
supported - and then you can use your regular tape media to create the
backupsets.)  If you want to restore the backupset locally, you have to have
media that the TSM client supports.

I have a site that has done this  - attached a CD burner to the AIX box, to
create backupsets on CD that can be used to restore an NT server.  (We did
this at AIX 4.3.3, TSM 4.2.0.)

Yes, you need a CD burner attached to your AIX box.  They aren't expensive.

But, you can't define the CD as a sequential device type to an AIX TSM
server.  Not a supported sequential device type for TSM on AIX.

So you create a devclass of type FILE on AIX disk storage somewhere, and
have TSM write your backupset to that.

Then you use the software that comes with the CD burner to create the CD.
It works like CD burners on Windows do - it reformats the data into an
"image" file, then writes that image out to the CD.   (This means however
big the client's active data is, you need TWICE that much free disk space to
work with.)

For right now it is an inexpensive solution that does what we need.  We want
backupsets for this application because the servers are located across a WAN
and throughput on a huge restore would be too slow.  It's practical for us
because these servers are relatively small - less than 2 GB of data to be
restored, so far.

This might or might not be practical in your case.  First you have the
requirement for 2 x the free disk space, and then the CD only gives you
600-800 MB of data per disk.   The software handles spanning to the next CD
with no problem, but , I still can't see planning to do this for a server
with a TB of data.

If I had a SAN, I would be playing with the idea of a standalone DLT drive
that could be made available to an NT box on demand; but I haven't tried
that.  The trick will be whether the TSM DLT drivers  write something that
the NT client can read - anybody out there tried it?