Dear ADSM community,

I'd be interested in hearing how others are handling a similar
requirements to the ones we have or if you have any good ideas.

The implementation has a 3494 library and critical data resides on =
almost
three hundred and fifty 3590 cartridges which are part of a collocated
(node level) offsite storage pool. In the event of disaster, the file
systems would be restored via 4 external 3590 tape drives. This is of =
couse
an extremely manual process. The objective is to minimise the manual
cartridge loading/unloading as much as possible within the constraints =
of
not having a library. To this end, the original system architect =
decided to
do a full backup once a week (thereby essentially collocating =
filesystem
data) and incrementals daily  thereafter. Cartridges are moved offsite
daily. A disaster recovery test worked well.

This has worked up to now but the volume of data being backed up is
increasing quickly - the full node backups are causing the recovery log =
to
fill, trigger db backups and recently this has also lead to ADSM =
crashing.

How do others prepare for similar disaster recover scenarios?
ie no automated cartridge handling and a requirement for fast restores =
of
large volumes of data.

I have considered collocation at the filesystem level coupled with
incremental backups, but I understand this would quickly lead to all
scratch tapes in the library being defined even though they might =
contain
only small filesystems. I cannot allow this to happen as scratch tapes =
are
required for other operations. I understand strictly speaking I could
define volumes to my offsite storage pool with collocation enabled at =
the
filesystem level but this is not practical - there are so many volumes =
for
this storage pool being checked in and out, I would be sure to run out =
of
volumes quickly.

My initial reaction was one of horror when I saw that a full backup was
being performed weekly. I had always assumed ADSM would be set to =
perform
incrementals ad infinitum. I'd be interested in hearing if other =
locations
also run full backups too and what approaches others are taking to meet
similar requirments.

Thanks for any input,

Eric Winters
IBM Global Services Australia