[geeks] windows service without outside resources

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Wed, 27 Feb 2008, Brian Dunbar wrote:

> Short summary: Business has long specified full recovery of everything
> in X hours.  IT points out that 'everything' is pretty nebulous and at
> any rate It takes Y hours to get the tapes from the storage facility
> to the DR site, then Z hours to get data from tape.  All of which
> exceeds X by a large and uncomfortable margin.

A well-set-up Tivoli Storage Manager installation could do a long way
toward working around that.  Migrate data from tapes into the DR-site
storage pool on their way to offsite retention.  That puts the disk
storage pool at the DR site about as current as the previous day's
backup.

Basically, instead of moving tapes from "production" to "offsite", you
move them from "production" to "DR" and "DR" to "offsite".  This would
require a library at the DR site to facilitate loading a day's batch of
tapes unattended, but if management "has to have", this puts a dollar
amount on "has to".

If your dailies are inordinately small (16G or so), you can also do this
over a T1, so that no one has to drop tapes off any place unusual.

I could recommend some top-flight TSM consultants who could help you set
this up.  That is, if you're not opposed to becoming a TSM shop.  I ran
it at $agency and loved the degree of automation and reporting it gave
me.

Of course, liking TSM means you have to accept its mentality of backup.
It's weird, it's strange, it's different, and it's unique; however, once
you make that mental jump, you'll wonder why you ever thought "normal"
tape rotations were a sane approach.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke | "There is no such thing as a short of reserves...
Elgin, TX         |  one bank can have a problem...the Fed can print
USA               |  money, there is no shortage."
.                 |     --Jim Glassman, US Economist, JPMorgan Chase