Thinking outside the box a little, if you have multiple clients in
Qatar, how much trouble would it be to set up a TSM infrastructure in
Qatar?  Buy a server of whatever type you like to support, with enough
disk to contain the entire backup data set of all the clients.  If you
use your includes so you only include the data that you really need, and
don't keep back too many versions, and compress at the client, this
might not be too much disk.

We have a remote site with 50 clients, and a 4TB array (one drawer of
500GB SATA drives, subtracting RAID and spare drive) is enough to hold
all the backup data.  

If you require an offsite copy (and you should), you might be able to
send that using server-to-server to a TSM server here.  Do your "backup
stgpools" and "backup db" to virtual volumes in the US, multi-threading
as much as possible.  Also do a "backup db" to file stgpool locally.  It
will all depend on how much data you back up each day whether you can
keep up.

The advantage of this approach is that day-to-day restores will be done
locally in Qatar, and therefore fast.  The only time you need the remote
copy is for the real disaster.

Best Regards,

John D. Schneider
Lead Systems Administrator - Storage
Sisters of Mercy Health Systems
3637 South Geyer Road
St. Louis, MO  63127
Phone: 314-364-3150
Cell: 314-486-2359
Email:  John.Schneider AT Mercy DOT net


-----Original Message-----
From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On Behalf Of
Allen S. Rout
Sent: Wednesday, March 19, 2008 9:44 AM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: Re: [ADSM-L] Looooooooooong distance backups


>> On Wed, 19 Mar 2008 10:03:04 -0400, Wanda Prather <wprather AT JASI DOT COM>

>> said:

> And figure out what you are going to do in case of a system failure.  
> If the total client is many GB, how long will it take you to restore 
> the whole thing? Frequently on a WAN, incremental backups are 
> practical, but full restores aren't - a good strategy is to keep a 
> spare server in your data center; in case you need a full system 
> rebuild, do it locally and then Fedex the box to where it needs to go 
> -- it will get there faster!

At the risk of being a fanboy, "What she said".

Again, this is a simple extrapolation from going across the street, off
your network.  At UF, we have some offices that are a few miles off
campus (Distance Education, natch) and we see situations where it would
be faster to unrack the new box, drive it across town, and restore at Gb
speeds than to fill up their link for a few days.


- Allen S. Rout