I have come across this scenario before, and we too decided against
generating subsets of tapes. It distorts the restore times compared to a
'real' disaster, and implies knowledge of the impending disaster.

We decided to go through the test relying on day to day procedure to
maintain the data we needed. The first time through was, interestingly,
a disaster.. but it helped us evaluate our setup and procedure, and by
the third time through everything worked well, and we generated fairly
consistent & reliable recovery times that could then be used with some
confidence to predict how long recovery  of various systems would take.

Matt.

-----Original Message-----
From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On Behalf Of
Joe Pendergast
Sent: Monday, August 30, 2004 5:21 PM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: Re: Disaster Recovery

There are multiple options for this scenario.

If the systems are small enough, and you have plenty of tapes, you can
produce "backupset" tapes of each system.  A backupset is a self
contained
tape that allows the client to restore without needing the TSM server.
We
use a backupset for one of our critical systems.

The idea of a separate offsite pool with the critical systems on it
works
just fine.  One thing that we had to set up was a move data script to
keep
all the data for the offsite tapes down to just a few tapes.

One thing I must caution you on DR tests:  Keep it real.  We have one
group
that creates a "special" set of tapes just for their DR test.  This
makes
their test very successful, but I am very afraid of an actual disaster.
In
the case of an actual disaster they will not have time to create
"special"
tapes, and thus they will be recovering under totally different
circumstances.  I am fearful that they will be unable to meet their SLA
in
an actual disaster.  My group is using standard processes against the
standard set of tapes that are sent offsite every day.




                      James Choate
                      <jchoate@SOURCE1I        To:
ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
                      NC.COM>                  cc:
                      Sent by: "ADSM:          Subject:  Disaster
Recovery
                      Dist Stor
                      Manager"
                      <[email protected]
                      .EDU>


                      08/30/2004 08:13
                      AM
                      Please respond to
                      "ADSM: Dist Stor
                      Manager"






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


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