Re: BRMS: System save only -- MIDRANGE-L

Officially?

We get to tell our corporate office that, yes, we have a formal backup and
restore policy. I don't know if a business recovery strategy was discussed. As
a manufacturing plant, if the building gets wiped away, then recovering the
AS/400 and network are minor compared to the millions lost in machinery.
Restoring the AS/400 (at least, since it has our MRP; HR & payroll are on a
server in Michigan) is a very important task, but what use is it without the
equipment to build parts?

In reality?

We get more peace of mind. It is easier to find someone outside the company
who knows BRMS and can get the system restored, than to ask someone (who might
have been hit by the milk truck) which tapes had the savsys, savsec, user
profiles, etc and figure out how to restore the system.

BRMS provides, among a boatload of reports, a restoration plan from a system
perspective. I haven't looked at it in detail. But it can print just about
every configuration setting on the system that you could desire. I believe it
makes configuring a similar box easier (to accept the restore).

It allows us to utilize our 3590 drive to its fullest extent. When it was
bought, the only consideration was given to speed and tape capacity (at the
time - 1997-1998). Until recently, it was operated only in single tape mode
(not library). We used home-grown CL backups (including restricted state). The
NT/network side recently implemented a tape library to handle the network
backups, with full tape rotation and media handling and reporting
capabilities. Then the boss tells the AS/400 side "do what they did". We have
the tape drive/library, but not the software to drive it correctly.

None of this means we could not have made something similar on our own; but at
what cost? The cost of BRMS is easily offset in the number of weeks? months?
it would take us to duplicate functionality and reliability.

One thing that irks me, being an AS/400 person, is it looks like that BRMS or
Tivoli could run on the AS/400, and use the 400's attached tape devices to
back up the network. Then we would have one backup facility instead of two;
one place to find all the data for our plant instead of two; one place to
manage the backup and recovery needs of the plant instead of two. That's
neither here nor there. :)

In short, BRMS gives us an offical way to placate the corporate office, and
better formalize our backup and recovery strategies. Both of these things are
more easily done with a recognized package than with custom programs and "not
invented here".

Loyd

On Mon, 31 Dec 2001 13:54:05 -0600, Brad Jensen <brad@elstore.com> wrote:

>Loyd Goodbar wrote:
>>
>> We are also experimenting with BRMS to bring our "backup and recovery plan" 
>in
>> line with the organizational requirements (tape rotation, offsite storage,
>> etc.)
>
>
>What does BRMS get you, that you don't have without it?

--
"Why, you can even hear yourself think." --Hobbes
"This is making me nervous. Let's go in." --Calvin
loyd@blackrobes.net  ICQ#504581  http://www.blackrobes.net/