Re: Are there vendors who have System i5 bare metal, restore, capability

Don,

The recovery test is easy and BPCS can be loaded (with some assistance from your vendor) for a seven day DR test without charge (at least last time I tried it). Why are you asking about another vendor if the hot site you use is capable? That would be the way to go from a cost perspective I would think. Any or all of the partners I mentioned also have the ability to do that. You can even use an integrated Windows environment for the Exchange Recovery test if there is one available. If you need assistance and not hardware, again multiple options are available.
Even a tape vault needs to have a back up of some sort be it another vault or tape. If you are using a hot site the best easiest way to accomplish what I think you want to do is to get the Hot Site to have a duplicated tape vault and replicate the data to them after each back up.

I might suggest that a good way to go would be to use the virtual tape (with BRMS) facility and back up to disk on your i. Then use any one of a number of ways to push that data over to a small power i at the hot site, you can even just use FTP if you want. You do not need to have BPCS loaded on that system until needed. That may accomplish what you want at the lowest possible cost.
Jim Oberholtzer, MSE
Chief Technical Architect
Agile Technology Architects -- LLC
Office: 414-433-4363

Jim,

I hear you. I'm not totally sure how to go about this yet.

A couple of our goals are:

- Accomplish a complete DR type system restore - per our B.O.D. request.

- Move completely off of tape (the i5 is all we have on tape now), but
prefer to go right to an external data vault (System i and Exchange
server only - < 100GB total) and to NOT have an intermediate onsite D2D
device.

- Want to do the DR restore and user testing (with appropriate BPCS
temporary license - if needed?) from the external data vault - but don't
know how they would convert back to the needed tape restore format? We
have a local hot site company where we could contract to use their
system for the DR test.

Thanks,
Don