Stan

Thanks so much for your speedy response - I am responsible for backup for
central computing at Brown University.   As I'm sure you are aware having
input from other universities is always helpful in steering universities to
the correct decisions in our environments.  Your email on this will be quite
helpfull to get our datacenter to do the right thing.  We have had holiday
shutdown going on three years now and this is the first year they have made
an issue out of this.  Most likely because we have an issue keeping up with
storage for our ever growing backup requirements, so our datacenter manager
can't keep enough tapes in the libraries.  I am going to suggest to him to
empty the library of any full staging tapes and load it up with scratch
tapes to handle the holiday week.

For what it's worth I read through your earlier response on your site
configuration and we have very similar site sizes and configurations.   We
have been trying to use our operations and production services organizations
to help provide support for Legato Networker backups as well as mainframe
support - and it has been very challenging to say the least.

Thanks


Nancy


On 12/12/06, Stan Horwitz <stan AT temple DOT edu> wrote:

On Dec 12, 2006, at 5:45 AM, Nancy Magers wrote:

> Hi Networker Listserv,
>
> My datacenter is requesting that we stop backups over the holiday
> break to
> facilitate minimal staffing.  They don't want to have to be
> responsible
> for checking logs, making sure there are tapes available and
> logging calls
> on priority backup incidents.  Has anyone ever had this sort of
> request
> before?
>
> I obviously have many concerns with this request and I'm interested in
> hearing feedback from the list on this.

This depends on each site's situation. For the first time in about
six years ago, we here at Temple University will have the week off
between Christmas and New Years as a holiday bonus and most of the
University will shut down.

I am the one who checks the logs and does everything else concerning
my data center's backups. I plan to continue doing backups as normal
during the holiday break even though we will run unattended. My
employer has invested a huge amount of money to do lights out
backups, so this really isn't an issue here. I do not handle our
mainframe backups and the contractor who does will be on site doing
that and shipping off tapes for off-site storage as normal over the
holiday, but most University employees including me will be home that
week. If I did have to go in to send tapes off site, I would simply
arrange comp time, which is what our campus policy and our hospital's
employees are doing.

Checking backup logs can wait. If a backup breaks, fixing it will
wait, which is more than what would happen if no backups at all where
done. Making sure tapes are available during the holiday period is
not an issue for my site because our backups are done to two large
tape libraries. Last week, I made sure that we have enough writable
tapes in both tape libraries to take me into at least the middle of
next month after I return from vacation. If I have time, I will open
up my NetWorker console remotely to see how things are going, but
unless there is a major problem, I will not take any action involving
our backups until January 3rd when I return to work. The same will
happen when I am away on vacation the following week. I live only
about 20 minutes from my office, so if I do have to pop in for
something unexpected, such as remove a stuck tape, its not a big deal.

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