Hotsite test--narrowing down the amount of tapes necessary for a test recovery

[cgrone]

I have a test recovery scheduled in August for TSM and 7 client systems on various operating systems. The test will be done at a "warm" site 600 miles from our production environment. I am using TSM 5.1.6.3 with the DRM module backing up 200+ clients into . Some of the clients are collocated on their storage pools but still generated an unreasonable number of tapes to haul or have hauled to the test DR site.



We have about 1500 tapes offsite. When I ran report to see how many tapes we might need for restoration, I came up with about 900. We can't take 900 tapes to the offsite facility. I have a few options, such as running an archive on the client just prior to the DR test then sending only these archive tapes out.



Does anyone have any other better suggestions on how to shrink down the number of tapes necessary for a DR restore without doing something special prior to the test?

 

[rkampmann]

Hi,



consider taking backupsets - maybe on files so that you can store multiple of them on tape (just archiving the files).



Bye



R.

 

[jcoats]

I understand that using groupwise co-location should help, but that isn't coming any time soon, but it is supposedly on the radar at IBM/Tivoli.

 

[heada]

We have a similar problem, but on a smaller scale.



I have about 200 clients and about 900 tapes. If I were to send off what was needed for a normal restore, I would need to bring about 200 tapes.



Since I know only a very small sub-set of my total clients are DR clients, on those clients I perform an absolute backup. That way I only need the tapes from that day to do a full restore of the node....fairly small number of tapes (~15) and a faster restore (but longer backup)



-Aaron