Re: Backups in HA environments

[Evan Harris <spanner@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Steven

A couple of questions:

- What time frame do the tapes have to be available in ?
- Do the tapes HAVE to come from a save conducted on the primary site ?
- Is there any possibility you could courier the saves daily to the 
backup site so they're "already there" ?

A point worth making: if you can't trust the backups on your HA 
machine, then you don't have HA....

It does seem your boss hasn't thought through what she is asking, but 
that's the beauty of being a boss I guess :)

Regards
Evan Harris

At 08:47 a.m. 14/12/2006, you wrote:

> We are new to the HA environment, and still trying to take advantage of
> the features available in the HA environment. I'd appreciate some
> suggestions from others working in the HA environment for the best way to
> do backups.
>
> We have a pair of Model 520 I5+ systems running iTera Echoe2 software. Our
> business software is a custom written application, which we continue to
> enhance.  Each systems is partitioned into 2 partitions running business
> software. The first partition does our primary processing and the second
> partition provides our web services, and does data collection while the
> first partition does end of day processing. We need to maintain 24/7
> availability, but we are allowed a few minutes to switch our processing
> between these partitions.  Our initial plan (from the programmers) was to
> move the backup process to our HA box, and eliminate the backup window.
> This would also allow us to eliminate the switch between partitions, since
> the data collection can continue on the primary partition during our night
> processing. The HA box will be deployed to a remote location to allow our
> processing services to continue in case of problems at our primary site.
> We also have a third party remote hot site in case our first two sites are
> unavailable.
>
> However our manager has declared that she wants to be able to get a set
> backup tapes from our primary site, in case we need to evacuate to our
> third party site.
> Has anyone else had to resolve this problem?
>
> One solution I am working through is to do the backup at our HA site, and
> then replicate the tapes back to our primary site.  We are currently
> backing up about 2.5GB each night. Our full system backup currently fits
> on a single 400GB tape. We are using BRMS for our backup/recovery
> solution. Does networking the BRMS tape libraries on the primary and
> backup systems allow us to duplicate tapes from one system to the other?
> We are currently running V5R3. Would Virtual Tape on V5R4 offer a better
> solution?
>
>
> Steven Morrison
> Fidelity Express
> 903-885-1283  ext. 479