RE: 400 Disk Storage Crisis

Regarding the political clout to get a downtime window for backups, tell
your manager -- or however high up the food chain you have to go -- that
you are concerned about the potential for lost data, revenue, shipments,
or sales that might result from downtime due to not having good backups.


Hmm.  If your management isn't impressed, you may get results by talking
to your company's risk management group.  They are generally quite
influential.  If you don't have a risk management group, find out who
handles insurance issues for the company.  Internal Audit might be next
on the list; if your system has to be concerned with SOX or other
compliance, then failure to consistently back up -- and make complete
backups -- is a red flag.  Failing that, try the Comptroller or COO.

They may come with a statement that they're willing to accept the risk.
That's fine.  The point is to make it known that the company is assuming
a risk and get that risk documented.  Besides opening eyes and
frequently opening wallets, it's a huge CYA for when a problem
eventually does happen.

If you go down this route, don't just state your concern.  It's critical
to lay out options for solving the problem:
1. A dedicated backup window from 1-5AM every night.
2. Alternatives to shorten the window.  Say, the 1-5 is with current
hardware.  You could drop that by __ percent if management approved an
upgrade to a faster tape drive.  
3. Consider a new box.  Expensive, obviously, but there are a lot of
benefits.  I don't know what hardware you currently have, but an i5 with
an LTO2 or 3 tape drive and the 15K disks would probably provide drastic
performance improvements for everything you run - BPCS batch jobs,
backups, etc.
4. Maybe just an OS upgrade.  There are improvements to
save-while-active with V5R3.  Couple them with a revised backup strategy
and maybe that would suffice.