I starting a tech refresh for our TSM setup. I am looking to move to containers. I have done my homework, purchased the correct hardware and have laid out a plan. I read in IBM's best practices that if we backup to tape from stgpools that containers isn't the best option. So my question is should I go to containers if I need to have the tapes because of policy? If I understand everything correctly what gets backed up to tape is not the individual pieces of data but the stgpool extents? If I lose all my stgpools can I restore them from tape?
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Moving to Containers
- Thread starter Ekaj525
- Start date
marclant
ADSM.ORG Moderator
Correct
If you lose your container pool, you can repair the container pool from tape, that's not the issue. The issue is that since it's extents on tape, clients can't restore from tape, so in a DR, clients would have to wait until the storage pool is fully repaired before they can attempt restores. And that can take a few days or more depending on the size.
So in the event of a real DR, can your company afford to wait a few days before being able to restore clients at the DR site? In most cases, the answer is no.
So that leaves you with two options:
1 - have 2 SP servers in 2 different locations and use protect stgpool and node replication to keep both sites in sync. So if the primary server goes down, clients can do restores from the secondary server. If the outage is for an extended period, the secondary server can be changed as the primary to allow client backups. You can still do a 3rd copy to tape for legal requirements if necessary. Ideally from the secondary server to relieve the primary server from that workload.
2 - use traditional storage pool(s) with tape copy pool
marclant
ADSM.ORG Moderator
Make sure you follow the Blueprint, you will save yourself a lot of trouble, especially with performance.
http://ibm.biz/IBMSpectrumProtectBlueprints
http://ibm.biz/IBMSpectrumProtectBlueprints
Will do, thank you for the info. I will not be performing this alone, I plan on hiring an impelmentor to help with the transition.
RecoveryOne
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What marclant is saying is 100% spot on.
I jumped the gun so to speak by moving to container storage pool from the legacy file pools. Some days I think it was the best thing ever. I backup the container's to tape, I backup more than IBM recommends to tape from the container's. Everyone knows that if we lost the main disk unit, it would be days, if not weeks to restore all the data back to a new disk unit before we could facilitate client restores. I'd like to say my situation was a bit unique, as I was able to leverage the better data reduction capabilities of the containers vs legacy to help me meet retention requirements, but it was a trade off for recovery in the event of a TSM failure.
And yes, follow the blueprints!
