One question to think about is, if my system is down what is my recovery
time objective. If it's going to take you 36-hours to download the
recovery data from the cloud, can my business survive with this system.
If that is possible, then move forward. If not, then another solution
may be needed. Also, I would suggest testing this solution to ensure
your processes are laid out and you can go through as many "what-if"
scenario's as possible.
Patrick Bingham
Power Systems Solutions Engineer
IBM Certified Advanced Technical Expert - System i Solutions
MSI Systems Integrators
(w) 402.965.2381
(c) 402.212.2944
(f) 402.965.2414
Your Business.Better
-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Steven Spencer
Sent: Tuesday, April 28, 2009 11:56 AM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: RE: iSeries and Windows Network cloud backup
Hi,
Richard
Why would you bother with cloud backup which is probably somewhat
slow > when you already appear to have a good tape backup strategy ?
Seems to me you would be better served making sure you have the
latest > backup software and current high-speed tape drive. Just my
two cents :-) > Regards, Richard Schoen RJS Software Systems Inc.
Richard, this is a good question. The answer is largely redundancy. It
is hard to always check that your tape is readable on another puter (I
remember one System 36 experience where the tape made and read its own
data, but it was off-kilter). And it is cumbersome to have more than
one tape offsite at a time.
Recently our own CPAs got into a jam with a PC network (I think)
RAID-system backup (unreliable complexity, whatever messes up one disk
can mess up another, better for hot-swapping than backup
assurance) and one tape .. which was unreadable, corrupt. Plus, also
recently, one company exec ran into a personal Apple backup problem.
Thus we want to enhance our mission-critical business tape backup system
with a good solid cloud backup. For the anticipated $100/month or so, we
end up with a far greater peace-of-mind level. If it was personal
budget, maybe do not bother, simply watch the tapes, or add a secondary
tape method. However for a solid small business, just want a fuller
strategy. Originally I was approached about the Carbonite/Mozy attempt
(where you would likely send all the iSeries data over the lines every
day ... slowww) and we moved to the more robust storage possibilities I
mention here.
The speed issue is largely taken care of by the iSeries-savvy software,
which reads hashes and only resends changed blocks. Thus there is a
real reduction in time after the first save. (Also uses compression
algorithms.) We make sure to get a 30-day OK with whomever we choose.
Hope that helps.
Steven Spencer
Queens, NY
And our tape backups are quite solid, including taking off-site, so
this is meant more for auxiliary than anything else -- minor restores
will likely be few and far between, since we could use the tape and
simply do not do a lot of restores.
--
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