IBM FastBack and SAP

ukhan20

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PREDATAR Control23

i want take backup of SAP (DB + Application) in FastBack server how can i do.
 
PREDATAR Control23

Hi,

first - you have to understand what FastBack is and what it is not.
FastBack can replicate DISKS (partitions) between client and the server repository. It has no knowledge about application within the partition. As it uses VSS (on Windows), application as MSSQL, MS Exchange (and other with VSS writers) are in consistent state when the VSS snapshot is run.
I was told by FastBack instructor that for large (he was speaking about 100GB+) and heavily loaded applications the VSS writer is unable to flush all data to disk in time, so it can fail.
If you have an application without VSS support, you can use "pre/post backup scripts" to freeze/unfreeze the application to achieve consistent image to transfer.

Great thing on FastBack is that is is block-level incremental forever backup.

Starting with version 6.1 there is a support for Linux. There is no support for AIX in the roadmap (I've been told ...)

Harry
 
PREDATAR Control23

So, if I had several Exchange servers that were more than 1TB in size and TDP backups were not finishing inside our backup window, TSMFB is likely not going to help me here?

Could the VSS snapshot very well fail on such a large volume?
 
PREDATAR Control23

Hi,
it may help you pretty well - depends on the load of the exchange servers. One of our client uses Microsoft DPM (which uses VSS based replication as well for Exchange) for Exchange 2k7 with cca 2TB of data with no problem.
Go and try :)

Harry
 
PREDATAR Control23

I must admit I expected a different answer; that perhaps the time it takes to snapshot the full server is the same as a normal file level backup. It certainly seems that backing up the mounted snapshot using B-A will still take the same amount of time. I'm essentially looking to replace TDP for Exchange backups to tape (via Storage Agent) with snapshots on tape. There are 14 Exchange servers averaging 1TB each.

As I understand it, I have to take the snapshot first, mount that snapshot from a server running a B-A client then back it up. It does appears that I need a "FB hub" server and that I can mount the snapshot right on the FB server.

Now, I do not have 15TB of disk to keep all these Exchange server snapshots online. I was planning on removing or overwriting the snapshots as needed. This means that in order to restore an Exchange mailbox I'd have to restore the snapshot(s)from tape so the FB server can make that data available to the FB EXchange client. I haven't even gotten to the incremental snapshot considerations. Does the initial snapshot have to be available to the FB server in order to create the next (incremental) snapshot?
 
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