James Choate wrote:

Hi,
please forgive me if you are receiving this again.  The listserver informed me 
that my orginal post had a duplicate subject line and was not posted.


Hi all,

We are going to SunGard in November and we are interested in rebuilding our TSM 
server and 3 nodes that are in our environment.  We do not want to take our 
entire OFFSITE tape pool with us to Sungard.  Is there a way that we can easily 
create a seperate storage pool for just the 3 nodes we are interested in 
recovering + at the same time leave our current OFFSITE storage pool in place?

Any ideas of what other folks are doing in this scenario would be greatly 
appreciated.

Thanks,
James Choate

James,

I think I have the basic idea of what you are trying to accomplish.  It
seems to me that it could be done with just a couple of simple ,although
maybe time consuming, steps.

   * First I would create three new storage pools one disk, primary
     tape and copypool.
   * Then update your three nodes so that they are now sending there
     data into the new disk and/or primary tape pool.
   * You will then need to run a "move node data" on those 3 nodes to
     move all the node data from old primary to new primary.  This will
     not work for the copypool since move node data for copy pools only
     works within the copypool itself.  Note, depending on the amount
     of data and the availability of disk pool space you might consider
     doing the "move node data" with a disk pool as the target.  This
     will allow for more concurrent process given the same number of
     tape drives.  Also, when doing the backup of the primary pool to
     copypool coming from a diskpool will be more efficient.
   * Once the move node data completes you will need to backup the new
     primary pools to the new copy pools.
   * Note you will need to continue to backup the new primary pools to
     both your existing copypool and the new copypool in order to meet
     your requirement of keeping the current offsite pool intact.
   * The new copypool tapes can actually remain onsite (since you are
     taking the original copypool tapes offsite) so that you could
     easily take them to the DR test with you.

One other thing I might mention here, if I were the auditor of this DR
test I would ding you a little for just pulling out a subset of the DR
tapes to bring for the test.  I certainly understand the reasoning and I
am not saying I would fail the DR test based on that alone, but it is
not a 100% true representation of what would happen in a real DR.  Also,
the fact that you know way ahead of time which machines you are going to
recover changes the effectiveness of the test.  In other words, if I
really was going to test you on your DR restoration capabilities I
wouldn't even tell you which three machines to restore until the test
started!  Of course that kind of test would be much more expensive, but
like I have always said all of this stuff is like buying insurance the
better coverage you want the more it will cost you!

--
Regards,
Mark D. Rodriguez
President MDR Consulting, Inc.

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