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Re: [Networker] What ARE the rules?
2005-12-07 13:19:07
On Dec 7, 2005, at 12:41 PM, David Mingia wrote:
We are just implementing Legato as a backup scheme to replace
Veritas and
are questioning how and why we are delivering the backup services we
provide to our small private college. Any colleges out there
willing to
share what you do for your customers and why you do what you do?
Legal
requirements? Customer service requirements?
I am resisting setting up a scheme simply because that is the way
we have
always done it.
Unless you are backing up computers that you or others in your group
directly manage, avoid assuming complete responsibility for the
integrity of each night's backups. What we do here is require that
each system administrator who has a system that's backed up to the
central NetWorker complex that I manage be the first point of
responsibility for ensuring that their data is backed up and can be
restored. Unless you are familiar with the data you are backing up,
do not assume full responsibilty that the backups work.
What we do in my group is tell our users (i.e., individual systems
managers) that they must do periodic recover tests. We strongly
encourage people to do at least one bare metal restore a year per
server where ever possible. Those of us who manage our NetWorker
server are here to make sure that the server is available for backups
and restores, as well as monitor the nightly backups, but we never
promise that data can be recovered unless its data that we directly
manage.
For the past few years, we would add on a new backup client without a
charge. Now, each new client connection slot that gets used requires
a fee. In fact, we just started that process within the past two
weeks and I simply tell people to order the number of client
connections they need from our reseller. We're at around 220 clients
(a mixture of Windows, Solaris, Linux, Mac OS X, and Tru64 Unix) and
we are working on a proposal now to back up the data on our old IBM
mainframe to our NetWorker complex.
You also need to have reasonable expectations established with how
fast data can be recovered and how you would deal with a disaster.
How this is done depends heavily on the needs of your users and
management.
One thing we have been deficient here is to set up a service level
agreement for each system we back up. We have these SLA's verbally
and informally, which has been very effective, but I would like to
put it all down in writing. Unfortunately, for various reasons
outside of my control, that hasn't happened.
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