RE: Disaster Recovery

Regardless of your backup strategy you should test at least once a year to
ensure that it works. After you have defined a backup strategy and all
the working pieces are put together, test it. That way you can correct
any issues that arise. The once a year (preferably once per Qtr IMO) test
is to ensure that no patches/upgrades, etc. haven't caused other issues to
crop up. Hopefully you'll never have a disaster but doing all you can to
ensure that your systems and data aren't lost is the only thing you can
do. We are currently looking at Mimix (I hope they approve it!!!). Right
now our backup/disaster strategy sucks IMO. Relying on tape media backups
and restoring to a different system is nowhere even close to what I call
desirable. I envy those with real HA capabilities!!!

Anyway at a previous company I contracted with, they use Vision for HA.
Once per quarter a roll-over was done after a year all of the major kinks
were worked out and now they all know what to do and how to respond to a
disaster. Which is a good thing, they had one of the data centers
flood...and they were back up and running with minimal issues. Where I am
now it's simply hoping that the tapes have good recent data and that the
media hasn't gone bad (ever found a bad tape???). Either way you're
already ahead of the game just by having the means for HA, use it, learn
it, live it. It just might save your behind someday....

Thanks,
Tommy Holden


From: rob@xxxxxxxxx
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: 09/17/2010 08:02 AM
Subject: RE: Disaster Recovery
Sent by: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx



Nothing has been tested yet? Does that include a Mimix switch? If you
haven't tested a Mimix switch I'd go for it. After ironing out the switch

back and forth we ran a weekend on the backup machine. That's when we
discovered our ODBC issues. It also helps for those people who say this
library or that directory is not that important and does not need to be
Mimixed. Or, maybe we should Mimix our spool files...

At some time we are planning a midweek test. Not until next year - crunch

project.


Rob Berendt