TSM, DD replication and tape vaulting

Tape vaulting would be done with external tape unit?  In such case, you would have share on each local DD which would get replicated to central one.  On central one export these to some system and do their backup using TSM.  It is a bit strange concept, but might be that customer wishes to keep it for longer period on tapes and does not use archiving tier on DD.

Ok, that's different.  So, you use VTL on each local site, replicate this to central site and wish to protect this further at central site, right? This is not possible as replication happens outside knowledge of TSM.  What eventually could be done, but do not quote me on that as I do not have such setup so this is in realm of guess, is to have central TSM scan/import these tapes on central site, but it would mean you need to create lib per DD and have them as such managed on central site which is kind of messy.  I think that for proper answer you will need someone with specific knowledge of TSM&DD joined operations.

Hi Hrvoje,

thanks for your reply.

I'm not sure I undestrand your reply.

The customer has a lot of remote sites, and in each site there is a TSM infrastructure (with tape library).

To evolve the infrastructure, the customer chose 2 sites to make a pilot.

In that sites, we put a DD with VTL configured.

TSM backups to DD.

The 2 remote DD should replicate the virtual tape to a central site, in which we have another DD.

This should be enough for a DR, but the customer wants to vault the backups to tape. The vaulting should be in the central site, and not in the remote sites.

It seems not be possible with TSM, because the central TSM didn't know anything about the remote backups and the replica.

The question is: there is a chance to have something that every day, after the remote backups and after the replica, can read from the replicated data on central site and do a vaulting to tape?

Regards

Ambrogio

Well Hrvoje,

is the same that I think.

TSM on central site didn't know about Virtual Tapes written by remote site and replicated.

Now I learned (but I don't think it's really true) that TSM cannot scan/import tapes.

I will try to involve some specialists on IBM.

Regards

Ambrogio

TSM does not store any "index" information on the tape itself, everything is in the database, what files reside on what volume, retention ..etc.

we use TSM and DD. Yes you can import tapes into TSM but what good does it do if you don't have the actual application database.

Doesn't import scan populate DB?  We are talking about scanning tapes so that application learns about content on tape.

They can't?  Strange... imagine that you move from one server to another tapes.... there must be a way to import those tape (scan them back into application catalog).

you are in deep $@^$ if you don't have your TSM database, you can't rebuild your database just by auditing a bunch of tapes. When you read redbooks you will see how much they emphasize protecting your DB (which is DB2 btw) as well as protecting the volhistory file that tells TSM which volumes were used for DB backup. Without this file and the actual DB volumes you can't restore TSM database.

Interesting... so in case that you have DC lost and all you have is tapes written by TSM, let's say without TSM catalog data, you build things from scratch, but tapes are useless as you can't scan those tapes and populate DB with data what's on it? I'm not trying to say you are wrong - I simply do not know if TSM does have this option or not, but all the other big players (where TSM is also one of them) certainly have that possibility so I'm a bit confused about that feature (or lack of it).

ok, I see... in that case it is clear - suggested plan would not work at all.  The only workaround would be to use something else to dump data on remote location, replicate this centrally and do TSM backup from there, but I doubt that is anywhere near possible as most likely remote locations also require backups to be done solely with TSM.  In such case, mission impossible as it seems.

Right now there is no DDBoost for TSM, not sure if there ever will be one. Out TSM infrastructure consists of disk pools as primary pools and then an NFS export from DD as the next pool. Very simple, nothing special.

AIX 7.1, TSM 6.3.3

Hi Dynamox,

can you tell me your experience with TSM and DD?

And, there are rumors or roadmap for integration between TSM ad DDBoost?

For example, Networker can clone a saveset, and if the source and target are DD connected by a replica, the job is done by DD and the Networker Database is populated with the 2 entries. In this manner the user know that there are 2 copies of the same saveset, and one can be local and the other can be remote.

Bye

Ambrogio