Thanks to everyone for thoughts and ideas.
Most planning, sizing, bandwidth usage forecasting, SLAs and stuff like that
are almost done, it was how to do the initial full backup in the fastest and
cheapest way that bugged my mind.
One possible solution that just came to mind the other day is to create a
virtual TSM server, put the virtual image file on a USB disk and ship that to
the remote office. Then mount the image at the remote site (2/3 are vmWare
sites already, use VirtualBox on the rest), create a backup pool on the USB
disk, backup up the clients, put the image file back on the USB disk and ship
the disk back home. This saves the laptops. TSM performance might be crawling
in this setup, but we can live with that.
At the larger sites it is probably going to be a setup like Neils suggestion.
- Bent
-----Original Message-----
From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On Behalf Of
Neil Strand
Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2013 7:04 PM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: Re: [ADSM-L] TSM 1st full backup of remote low-bandwidth nodes
NAS device replication may not be a real option. The initial seed still has to
transfer all of the data. Assuming a T1 operating at 1.5Mbits per second, it
would take at least 14,814 hours (about 2 years) to transfer 10TBytes.
You may consider shipping a SAS attached LTO5 tape drive with a small form
factor (mini ITX MB) PC.
at remote site
- Backup locally to encrypted LTO5 media
- Backup the TSM server DB to LTO5 media
- Ship the encrypted tapes to the home office
- ship the TSM server and tape drive to the next remote office and repeat
at home office
- Perform a TSM server recovery at the home office
- export/replicate remote client data to primary TSM server
- point remote client to primary TSM server which is now seeded with remote
client data
LTO5 is less expensive than 10TB of JBOD and probably what you use at the home
office and can be easily encrypted and shipped.
Small form factor headless PC is less expensive than laptop and can be managed
remotely. All you need is someone to plug it into the ethernet, attach the tape
drive and swap tapes when requested.
Faster turnaround since the travelling TSM server(s) only returns to the home
office when all remote site backups are complete.
Thank You,
Neil Strand
From: Bill Boyer <bjdboyer AT COMCAST DOT NET>
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU,
Date: 01/16/2013 01:04 PM
Subject: Re: [ADSM-L] TSM 1st full backup of remote low-bandwidth
nodes
Sent by: "ADSM: Dist Stor Manager" <ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU>
Have you looked at replication of those remote sites as opposed to backup of
the sites directly?
For those sites that could use a storage replication device to replace the file
server (Netapp, Data Domain,...) and replicate it to possibly a central or hub
sites. Then back up from there? Replace the file server with a NAS CIFS device
and let it do the replication. If you use a solution like Netapp, snapshots can
even be your backup solution for the site.
Possibly "cloud" solutions. An example could be CarbonCopy and DATTO. Just to
name them as examples as opposed to recommending those specific products.
Or (and I can't believe I'm going to suggest this!) Microsoft DFS replication.
Just some other thoughts on the subject....
Bill
-----Original Message-----
From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On Behalf Of
Bent Christensen
Sent: Wednesday, January 16, 2013 11:25 AM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: Re: [ADSM-L] TSM 1st full backup of remote low-bandwidth nodes
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
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