BCV Script Alternatives

Thanks! Taking a look at the product sheet, it looks like it would probably work.

Have you, or anyone else, heard of any other options? I'm trying to get a view of 3 or 4 different products (if they exist). Or is Replication Manager generally the standard?

I don't know of any other products that automate timefinder jobs. ECC can be used to manage the jobs but I don't think it has any scheduling or automation built into it. I don't think you will find any other tools out there (maybe someone else can confirm this) because you need a tool that automates Solutions Enabler scripting and functions. Because EMC already makes Replication Manager, and batch scripting is already possible and heavily used by a lot of sym admins, I doubt any third party vendor would have the motivation to build a competing tool.

Chris ..don't know about any other products other than what Aran already mentioned ..but i wanted to know if your company had an enterprise scheduler, something like Control M or Tivoli workload scheduler. I was just thinking that could help you with your home grown scripts in terms of setting dependencies, job flow etc. Sorry ..not exactly what you are looking for but i figure i mention it

Here's a more detailed explaination: We have about 8 sites around the world that have either Oracle and/or ClearCase on Symmetrix or Clariions and one virtual storage team that supports them all. We use BCVs/Clones only for backups (other BCV uses are infrequent enough to be done manually). We've got a few other odds and ends that need instant snapshot backups, too. So this puts our platforms at Sun, HP-UX, Linux and Windows. Right now we have a script that manages everything (except Windows), but the guy who wrote it quite recently and there are some core flaws that need to be fixed to make things run smoother and eaiser to troubleshoot.

Its a pretty complex script that tries to handle all of the nuances that each platform, application, and BCV/Clone technology has. In addition, we also have platform version headaches to deal with. So having someone else fix the script will probably be close to the same amount of effort as re-writing it. So before we embarked on that, we wanted to see if there were any alternatives.

One thing in your reply, I didn't realize NetBackup had a module for this kind of thing. I did some searches and found an admin guide for version 3.4. It looks like it would do what we want it to do, but it only talked about Oracle and Sun/HP. No mention of ClearCase, Linux, or Clariions. But it was pretty old, so I can check the newer versions. The Backup team owns NetBackup, and they were outsourced, so that has its own challenges. But definitely a good avenue to pursue.

You answered your own question - if you are short on staff you definitely don't want to get into supporting home grown scripts especially for 4 very different operating environments that have their own quirks around storage/volume management.

Depending on you intend to use BCV/sClones you may have some other choices. If you are using them purely for nightly/weekly backup products (Networker, Netbackup, etc.) offer modules to control BCVs for use within a backup session. The downside is this only works in the context of a backup.

If you see yourself using BCVs/Clones for other automated tasks then you probably do want to consider Replication Manager as other posters have recommended.

However keeping that in mind you could still leverage ECC/SMC/symcli for basic BCV/Clone operations that do NOT require any volume/file system manipulation and save yourself some additional cost. A good example - using BCV/Clone to create a fast fall-back plan prior to system maintenance. Your fallback is to use a BCV/Clone operation to "restore" back to the production state while the system is down as an example.

The short of this - you need to identify how you intend to use these products and then target a solution (or multiple solutions) for each need as makes sense. Depending on your needs a combination answer may be best.

We used to have a scheduling product, but we had issues because the backup team owned it, but we owned the scripts it ran. We ended up retiring it and having someone from our team (who recently quit) write a comprehensive script to take care of the backups.

Right now most of our problems are with keeping the script updated for the quirks in the environment, and then making sure all of the team members know how to troubleshoot the complex script.

Thanks for the suggestion, though.

i am sure the guy who quit was diligent enough to write good comments in the script ?

Welcome to the new IT where most of the technical decisions have to involve the following (trust me not picking you your company - this sounds like everywhere these days):

1) Lack of resources.
2) Headaches dealing with staff augmentation (outsourcing)
3) Mish-mash architectures

The only thing you did not mention that is probably there is inability to spend enough money to implement whatever solution you choose

Unfortunately even with RM you still have to tackle some of the complexities for anything that is not standard (i.e. you may need to create a ClearCase script to aide with the environment as an example) but hopefully a canned product will cover enough of the work to make your task more bearable with your current staff.

I hear ya. Cost savings are the name of the game around here.

I'm a little scared that the amount of time it will take to research and implement any solution, combined with any aspects that don't quite match up with what we need, will roughly equate to the amount of time it would take to rewrite the script.

But I have to do the due diligence...

Yeah, he's got a fair amount of comments. Its just that some of the structure needs to be reworked to implement the changes we want.