Re: BRMS: System save only

>Loyd Goodbar wrote:
>
> Officially?
>
> We get to tell our corporate office that, yes, we have a formal backup and
> restore policy. I don't know if a business recovery strategy was discussed. As
> a manufacturing plant, if the building gets wiped away, then recovering the
> AS/400 and network are minor compared to the millions lost in machinery.
> Restoring the AS/400 (at least, since it has our MRP; HR & payroll are on a
> server in Michigan) is a very important task, but what use is it without the
> equipment to build parts?


Loyd, thanks for this extensive response. It really helped me
see what you are thinking.

> In reality?
>
> We get more peace of mind. It is easier to find someone outside the company
> who knows BRMS and can get the system restored, than to ask someone (who might
> have been hit by the milk truck) which tapes had the savsys, savsec, user
> profiles, etc and figure out how to restore the system.
>
> BRMS provides, among a boatload of reports, a restoration plan from a system
> perspective. I haven't looked at it in detail. But it can print just about
> every configuration setting on the system that you could desire.

You mean ont he AS/400, not the tape library?

>  I believe it
> makes configuring a similar box easier (to accept the restore).

I can see why that is useful.

> It allows us to utilize our 3590 drive to its fullest extent. When it was
> bought, the only consideration was given to speed and tape capacity (at the
> time - 1997-1998). Until recently, it was operated only in single tape mode
> (not library). We used home-grown CL backups (including restricted state). The
> NT/network side recently implemented a tape library to handle the network
> backups, with full tape rotation and media handling and reporting
> capabilities. Then the boss tells the AS/400 side "do what they did". We have
> the tape drive/library, but not the software to drive it correctly.
>
> None of this means we could not have made something similar on our own; but at
> what cost? The cost of BRMS is easily offset in the number of weeks? months?
> it would take us to duplicate functionality and reliability.

I'm not familiar with the cost of BRMS. Wha's it look like? Is
it tiered?

> One thing that irks me, being an AS/400 person, is it looks like that BRMS or
> Tivoli could run on the AS/400, and use the 400's attached tape devices to
> back up the network. Then we would have one backup facility instead of two;
> one place to find all the data for our plant instead of two; one place to
> manage the backup and recovery needs of the plant instead of two. That's
> neither here nor there. :)

The problem is generally that moving backup-sized data across
the network will clog it, and also you will not nearly reach
disk to tape speeds. Even gigibit ethernet is still formatted as
ethernet with tcp/ip on top of it. tcp/ip is robust but not
fast.

> In short, BRMS gives us an offical way to placate the corporate office, and
> better formalize our backup and recovery strategies. Both of these things are
> more easily done with a recognized package than with custom programs and "not
> invented here".
>
> Loyd


--
Brad Jensen brad@elstore.com
President
Electronic Storage Corporation Tulsa OK USA
918-664-7276

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