ADSM-L

Re: Incremental forever -- any problems?

2001-12-18 18:57:36
Subject: Re: Incremental forever -- any problems?
From: Kelly Lipp <lipp AT STORSOL DOT COM>
Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2001 16:51:57 -0700
Nick hit the nail on the head: prioritize the restores.  Know long before
what actually has to come back and how quickly.  Then take a look at how the
data is getting onto the tapes.  Do this for both on-site and off-site tapes
and you cover the daily restore and the disaster restore.

It turns out that a lot of data is naturally collocated.  That is a "full"
backup is all in one place.  Take a SQL or Exchange database backup.  The
agent backs up the whole thing, the whole thing gets moved to tape during
backup stg and during migration.  Natural collocation.  Nick's SAP database
is a different beasty, but he has a plan.  Does he move a lot more data?
Probably not a lot.  Especially if it's important during a restore.  So with
a little thought and Nick's cleverness you can handle the database problem.

What about fileservers?  There is really no easy answer.  By their nature
they are very hard to restore.  You can't collocate the offsite data.
Collocation does handle the on-site restore reasonably well unless the
server is huge then all bets are off.  Only thing to do there is break it
down.  DR is probably nigh on impossible in any reasonable amount of time
from copy storage pool tapes.

Backupsets?  Anybody done one of those for a 500 GB file server?  I'm
thinking probably impractical, but I'd love for someone with a fileserver of
this size to try it and report what they learn.  That'll just grab up a tape
drive for a couple of days is my guess, but who knows?  If this works then
periodic backupsets taken to the offsite augmented by copy storage pool
incrementals.  The other nice thing about this approach is that you can
dedicate a tape drive to the server doing the restore and get on with the
rest of your TSM restores.

You know the really good news is we hardly ever have to do these restores.
But when we do we had better have a pretty good plan.  Or a pretty good
resume.

Kelly J. Lipp
Storage Solutions Specialists, Inc.
PO Box 51313
Colorado Springs, CO 80949
lipp AT storsol DOT com or kelly.lipp AT storserver DOT com
www.storsol.com or www.storserver.com
(719)531-5926
Fax: (240)539-7175