HI All

Environment is
TSM 7.1.1 server on AIX. 7.1.1 Storage agents on Linux,  7.1.1  BA clients, 
7.1.1 VE clients,  VMWare 5.5.  The VMware backups are via the SAN to a 
Protectier VTL.

My Client is an international financial organization so we have lots or 
regulatory requirements including SARBOX.  All of these require a monthly 
backup retained 7 years.  Recent trends in application design have resulted in 
multiple large MSSQL databases - up to 10 TB that never delete their data.  
Never mind the logic, the hard requirement is that these be backed up monthly 
and kept for 7 years, and that no variation will be made to the application 
design.

Standard process has been a daily VE incremental backup to a daily node  and 
monthly full to a separate node.  The fulls are becoming untenable on several 
grounds.  The VBS Servers need to run a scsi rescan on weekdays to pick up any 
changed disk allocations, and this interrupts any running backups.  The 
individual throughput of the Virtual tape drives is limited so sessions run for 
a long time and there is not enough real tape to use that.   Long running 
backups cause issues with the storage on the back end because the snapshots are 
held so long.

Does anyone have any practical alternate approaches for taking a monthly VMware 
backup for long term retention?

Thanks

Steve

Steven Harris

TSM Admin/Consultant
Canberra Australia

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