All,

I am looking for feedback on using locked canisters for offsite
vaulting.  I have setup DRM for several accounts who used open
containers and I have setup poor man's tape rotation without DRM with
open canisters, but I have never implemented a locked canister solution.

The problem as I see it is that not all the data on the tapes will
expire at the same time.  So what will happen is that some of the tapes
in the canister are available for reclamation and then return to the
data center, but other tapes will not be available at the same time,
this will cause the tapes in the canister to be out of sync.

I have thought of 2 ways to potentially deal with this problem:

1) Every week we can create a brand new copy storage pool and backup the
primary pools to the offsite pool.  After 3 weeks all the data in the
pool can be deleted and the tapes brought back onsite.  This is not
utilizing TSM's incremental backup storage pool feature, but would
guarantee that a complete set of data was taken offsite each week.

2) Use either import/export or generate backupset to create fresh tapes
every week.

--
Joshua S. Bassi
IBM Certified - AIX 4/5L, SAN, Shark
Tivoli Certified Consultant - ADSM/TSM
eServer Systems Expert -pSeries HACMP
AIX, HACMP, Storage, TSM Consultant
Cell (831) 595-3962
jbassi AT ihwy DOT com