I am not sure which SunGard facility you are going to, but we go to the
one in Philly every year to test the DR of our NetWorker server. We are
running on AIX.
Assuming that you have the correct NetWorker installation media,
bootstrap reports, correct tapes, and your SunGard contract specifies
the correct equipment, you should be able to get the basic NetWorker
server up and running fairly efficiantly. But as Stan mentioned, we have
no idea how big your environment is, how many servers, etc are involved.
I can say SunGard is very helpful, but you need to make sure you have
ALL the correct data & documentation in place prior to showing up.
Additionally, when you schedule your DR, SunGard will prepare the
hardward, in advance, as much as your contract provides for.
Is this the first time you will DR NetWorker? If so, keep in mind, you
will learn a lot the first time, so the 2nd time will be a little faster
:)
Let me know if you need more information.
-----Original Message-----
From: EMC NetWorker discussion [mailto:NETWORKER AT LISTSERV.TEMPLE DOT EDU] On
Behalf Of Stan Horwitz
Sent: Friday, July 27, 2007 10:06 AM
To: NETWORKER AT LISTSERV.TEMPLE DOT EDU
Subject: Re: [Networker] Sungard DR testing
On Jul 27, 2007, at 8:36 AM, Jon Fraley wrote:
> We are currently looking at using Sungard for DR purposes. I was
> wondering if anyone could share their experiences with Sungard in
> recovering the Networker server. Since the testing time is allocated
> in
> 8 hour slots, how long does it normally take to recover the server?
> How do you get much more in than the Netwoker recovery? We are
> currently on
> 7.2.2 running on Linux.
John, we use Sungard here at Temple for our mainframe DR and also a few
other servers such as our LDAP farm, email, and www.temple.edu.
Due to the cost involved, we don't keep a spare NetWorker server at
Sungard, but we do keep it and the majority of our backup media off-
site (a few blocks away from our primary data center). If we lose our
primary computer room, we will not lose our NetWorker server unless
there is some sort of nuclear holocaust!
There is no way anyone on this list can provide you with specific
details without more information. For example, how large are your
NetWorker server's media and client file indexes and how many clients
would you need to recover at Sungard? The more metadata your NetWorker
server manages, the more time recovering it to a standby NetWorker
server it will take. How fast is your disk storage and tape drives at
Sungard and your Sungard NetWorker server?
Although I can't give you specific numbers, I can tell you one thing
that's of critical importance for your employer's business continuity.
You need to know how long it takes to deploy critical servers and put
them in production if they blow up, flood, are stolen, or a serious
hardware problem occurs. Don't go by any numbers you get on this list;
you have to do good testing to see for yourself. You need to do a full
blown DR rehearsal at least once a year for each critical server.
Sungard will also make you pay for this service.
We do DR drills several times a year. In any given week, we recover at
least one critical server to a DR server (usually not at Sungard
though) and our success rate hovers around 99%! Like many organizations,
we get audited for our DR practices, so we are careful to make sure
things work during an audit. My trick is to tell those who are about to
be audited to do the DR drill a few days before the audit to make sure
it works and that they understand the process.
Amongst other things, my job is to make sure our NetWorker server and
the required resources are available for these audits. Doing practice DR
drills isn't always practical, but if possible, encourage it.
In fact, I will be involved with our next mainframe DR rehearsal at
Temple's Sungard site in a few weeks to learn how our mainframe DR
works; we do this sort of thing a few times a year. Past experience says
it takes 12 hours for us to migrate to one of Sungard's mainframes and
test the migration, but that may be totally different in your situation
and our timing should improve considerably with this next DR rehearsal
because we will be testing new backup media.
Depending on your situation, you might be better off with a disk-to-
disk replication solution to replicate your NetWorker server's metadata
to storage at Sungard instead of relying on recovering the data from
tape when a DR situation develops. Even for a small NetWorker server, it
can take several hours to migrate the metadata to a different server. A
NetWorker server with 20GB worth of metadata will take a lot less time
to recover then one with 200GB, but you can also pick and chose which
clients' metadata you recover after you recover your media database.
I am working on a project now where we are transitioning Temple's IBM
mainframe backups (payroll, student grades, accounts payable, financial
management, etc.) from old IBM mainframe tape cartridges to a virtual
tape library. That VTL tape library sits in the same room as our
mainframe, but its data gets replicated to our Sungard daily.
We have not tested this yet, but that test is the one I will be watching
in a few weeks. We tried doing this test last month at Sungard and it
failed miserably through no fault of our own, so we will be doing it
again soon!
My role in this project is to back up our mainframe VTL via NetWorker to
LTO-3 media for off-site storage for five years and to know how the
entire mainframe backup process works. I doubt we'll need to recover
NetWorker tapes at Sungard simply because we rsync the VTL data to
Sungard daily, which is also what we do with all the other DR servers we
have there.
--
Stan Horwitz
Temple University
Enterprise Systems Group
stan AT temple DOT edu
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