Hi!
Thank you for the helpful advice on the USB drives. I am glad that we can
use this. Our goal is to use this ONCE as a way to migrate a bunch of data
from an iSeries with an LTO4 drive to another iSeries that has a VXA2 tape
drive. The USB method is significantly less expensive than purchasing a new
LTO drive to replace the VXA2.
www.atempo.com has solutions that work for the iSeries and are for network
attaches storage. If we'd go down that route, then I'd only consider Atempo
and a Data Direct drive array.
-- Jake
-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of William Luke
Sent: Wednesday, February 10, 2010 8:01 AM
To: 'Midrange Systems Technical Discussion'
Subject: RE: USB Hard Drive
John,
You make some excellent points. In general this is serious business and
should be looked at very carefully. We are not sure we are going to use
this. It was just an ideas and we executed on it. We are not using it in
production at this time. Not sure we ever will.
I think the areas that need special attention are: (1) Quality of the
drives. I do think there are some companies manufacturing some drives that
could be considered for this. Also in using the methods we tested we used a
USB drive but it could have been done through Ethernet on a network drive.
(2) Reliability of the method being used, you are building this yourself.
Since this is not the standard method offered by IBM or supported by IBM.
You will be on your own if this does not work. Complete and extensive
testing, backup and restore are required. (3) Number of Drives and type of
storage. I would not do this without RAID storage which will increase your
cost.
Good luck,
Best Regards,
William Luke
Consultant, 239-214-2063
-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of John Jones
Sent: Wednesday, February 10, 2010 9:51 AM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Re: USB Hard Drive
Also, if you go the external HD route (NAS or USB-via-intermediary-machine),
plan accordingly. Not just for adequate space but for the other traditional
needs - retaining enough copies of your files, archiving for month- &
year-end backups and special-purpose backups, audit/legal mandates for
records retention, etc. Check with your off-site vendor (recall, Iron
Mountain, etc.) to see if they have special requirements or different costs
for HD storage & transport.
If you back up to USB drives, you will need a fair number of them to handle
things. If you back up to a NAS you'll need adequate NAS capacity + a way
to back it up since the NAS doesn't address off-site requirements. Or have
a remote server that you can use as a repository to copy from the NAS/USB to
free it up but that winds up being a lot of copies of the data and keeping
things straight could be problematic if not managed well.
Backups are not just about having the ability to restore the system in the
event of a crash. They are also used for meeting legal requirements,
restoring from "oops" events that might go undetected for weeks, meeting
client/vendor contractual obligations for data retention, off-site BCDR, and
so on. Your backup mandate should be coming from the business, including
Legal and the departments that use the system, and be architected by IT to
meet the requirements.
On Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 6:44 AM, William Luke
<william.luke@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>wrote:
Jake,
Our company is doing this now. On our test system 8203-E4A V6R1
You can save everything, but the OS and the LIC. These can only be saved
to
a unit that you can boot from.
You can save license programs and all user objects. The software runs in
the QSYS environment and uses FTP to send the save files to a network
attached USB drive. We wrote the code in REX but the company will not
let
us send it to anyone because of a liability issue. The REX code was only
about 30 lines of code.
On our network (which operates at only 100mb) it averaged ~ 3 minutes to
back-up 1 GB of user objects with the i running nothing else at the time.
This is about the same speed we see on our production I using LT04 tape
when
the system is active.
I saw an ad from Iomega last week that they have a 2 and 4 TB Network
Storage system USB and Ethernet with Raid 0 a Raid 1 for $370 and $670
respectively. I do not work for this company or sell these product.
If you try this I recommend you test it extensively before you make this
your primary system.
Good luck
Regards,
William Luke
Consultant, 239-214-2063
-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Jacob Anderson
Sent: Monday, February 08, 2010 6:00 PM
To: 'Midrange Systems Technical Discussion'
Subject: USB Hard Drive
Hello,
Has anyone tried using a USB hard drive to do a backup/restore of V6R1? I
want to do this on a 9405-520.
Thanks
-- Jake
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