SAP with DB2 backup agent

[bphealy]

Hi
I am setting up a system where I am running SAP on DB2. I have 2 choices of backup agent:

1. Standard DB2 agent that comes with the BA client
2. TSM ERP for DB2 agent

I am wondering which is the better option and if option 1 was chosen what are the pros/cons of that decision. I am concerned about the restore procedure associated with option 1, what are others using ?

 

[Cyrus]

TSM for ERP is better

1. You get the Administration Assistant with it
2. You will get better performance due to some functions (e.g. run length compression) inside TSM for ERP
3. Your access to support will be better, since the TSM for ERP development team knows SAP very well.

The downside: You will have to licenese it.

 

[mclawler]

Hi all, we are just starting to bring in SAP on DB2 into our organization, and we just purchased TSM 6.2.1...

Currently we had SAP setup in our Germany DC, they have it on a cluster and snapshot it every X amount of time, backing up one of those snapshots to tape for offsiting (the backup software they are using currently doesn't have an SAP agent).

Once we have TSM setup, I'm being told that we are going to continue doing our backups the same way.

Our SAP enviorment will be setup so that we have a high availablity cluster in the states and user Germany for DR.

We've purchased the ERP agent (as well as a few others), and I'm searching for some decent redbooks to use to help with why we should be using the agent rather than relying on snapshots for keeping this data secure.

Any help would be appreciated.

 

[ChrisRees]

Hi

Google SG24-7686-00

Its a redbook from 2009 but you will get the idea. For what its worth, we don't bother with the TSM ERP agent and just use the built in functionality of SAP and DB2 to talk to TSM. We've had no problems doing it this way and it keeps things simple.

CHeers

 

[Cyrus]

Not sure which OS (and disk subsystem) you have mclawler, if it is AIX you can use IBM FlashCopy Manager (successor of TSM for ACS) to create local snapshots leveraging flashcopy functions of your underlying disk subsystem and then backup the snapshots into TSM using TSM for ERP. You might want to keep some snapshots on disk and perform a weekly backup into TSM on top.

 

[mclawler]

SAP will be running on a p-series with AIX, the meat and guts of it will be stored on a NetApp san, which will be doing our snapshots.

 

[Cyrus]

NetAPP does rule out FCM (not supported on AIX). In this case you might have to do some scripting to implement a similar solution.
A common trap when scripting is, that folks forget 'checks', meaning they do not necessarily know if their snapshots represent a valid (restorable) backup.