Re: Less Down Time (was: Mean Time Between Failure)

Depending on your applications, they also may have some need for
semi-restricted states, where no one else can be in inventory when you doing
end-of-month, or need for regular reorganization of some files.

This week the Evansville AS/400 User Group meeting was a round table on
disaster planning & backup topics.
We shared a lot of stories of challenges & solutions.  I was there.

Several companies are 24x7 in which they have enough disk space to do a save
to save file on disk, then from disk to tape, then wipe out the save file on
disk.  They only have to take people off for 5 minutes while check pointing
what has to be saved.

One outfit knows which libraries not being used, and is saving them while
bringing everyone else down in that 5 minutes.

I do the AS/400 backup & other folks do the Microsoft Backup.
I can hear a lot of whining from my collegues.

>  From:    james@eaerich.com (James Rich)
>
>  On Thu, 17 Jan 2002, John Ross wrote:
>
>  > We have an IBM AS400 - 730 and 720.
>  > Luckily for us, our 2 systems have had
>  > 0 down time in many years.
>
>  This is probably not true.  Do you ever install PTFs or upgrades?  How
>  about backing up your system?  You do have down time.  You may not have
>  any failures per se but you do have down time.
>
>  It seems to me that compared to other stable systems (i.e. non-Microsoft)
>  OS/400 has more downtime due to backup/IPL.  That is probably due to the
>  database backup (which isn't necessary on my other systems since they
>  don't run the DB).  But OS/400 requires the system to be in a restricted
>  state throughout the backup process.  This can require a lot of downtime
>  every night.
>
>  Can anyone comment on:
>
>  1.  How to minimize downtime due to backup.  For example, how to get a
>  good "snapshot" of the data while minimizing the time spent in a
>  restricted state.
>
>  2.  How downtime due to system maintainance (daily backup, PTFs,
>  upgrades, etc.) compares between OS/400 and other stable OSes (like
>  Solaris, OS/390, other unix).  Does anyone run DBs on something besides
>  iSeries and can comment on their backup process?
>
>  Surely someone like the New York Stock Exchange has a lot of data to
>  backup every day and also can't allow their machine to be restricted for
>  very long.  How do they do it?
>
>  James Rich
>  james@eaerich.com

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