ADSM-L

Re: [ADSM-L] TSM 1st full backup of remote low-bandwidth nodes

2013-01-16 11:41:25
Subject: Re: [ADSM-L] TSM 1st full backup of remote low-bandwidth nodes
From: Bent Christensen <BVC AT COWI DOT DK>
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Date: Wed, 16 Jan 2013 17:25:06 +0100
Andy,

I do not totally agree with you here.

The main issue for us is to get all 107 remote sites converted to TSM 
reasonably fast to save maintenance and service fees on the existing backup 
solutions. With the laptop server solution we predict the turn-around time for 
each laptop to be around 2 weeks, which includes sending the laptop to the 
remote site, back up all data, send the laptop back to the backup center, 
export the node. With say 10 laptops this will take at least 6 months. We could 
buy more laptops but we cannot charge the expenses to the remote sites, and we 
are stuck with the laptops afterwards ...

Disaster restores is a very different ball game. Costs will not be a big issue 
and we have approved plans for recovering any remote site within 48 hours, 
which for a few sites includes chartering an aircraft to transport hardware and 
a technician.

 - Bent



-----Original Message-----
From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On Behalf Of 
Huebner, Andy
Sent: Tuesday, January 15, 2013 5:17 PM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: Re: [ADSM-L] TSM 1st full backup of remote low-bandwidth nodes

You should use the same method to seed the first backup as you plan to use to 
restore the data.
When you look at it that way a laptop and big external drive is not that 
expensive.


Andy Huebner

-----Original Message-----
From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On Behalf Of 
Bent Christensen
Sent: Tuesday, January 15, 2013 9:37 AM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: [ADSM-L] TSM 1st full backup of remote low-bandwidth nodes

Hi,

We are starting up a backup consolidation project where we are going to 
implement TSM 6.3 clients in all our 100+ remote sites and having them back up 
over the WAN to a few well-placed TSM backup datacenters.

We have been through similar projects with selected sites a few times before, 
but this time the sites are larger and the bandwidth/latency worse, so there is 
little room for configuration mishaps ;-)

One question always pops up early in the process: How are we going to do the 
first full TSM backup of the remote site nodes? 
So far we have tried:

 - copy data from the new node (include all attributes and permissions) to 
USB-disks, mount those on a TSM server (as drive X) and do a 'dsmc incr 
\\newnode\z$ -snapshotroot=X:\newnode_zdrive -asnodename=newnode'. This works 
OK and only requires a bunch of cheap high capacity USB disks, but our 
experience is that when we afterwards do the first incremental backup of the 
new node then 20-40 % of the files get backed up again - and we can't figure 
out why.

- build a temp TSM laptop server, send it to the remote site, direct first full 
backup to this server, send it back to the backup datacenter and export the 
node(s). Nice and easy, but requires a lot of expensive laptops (and USB disks, 
the remote sites typically contain 2 to 10 TB of file data) to finish the 
project in a reasonable time frame.

So how are you guys doing the first full backup of a remote node when using the 
WAN is not an option?

 - Bent