Re: BRMS Backup Strategy and Implementation

First of all I would reinitialize all your tapes and get rid of the
specific naming strategy. You are no longer looking at that. You should
only look at the BRMS reports and commands like WRKOBJBRM to see what tape
holds what. YOU have to take a leap of faith in technology. Would you
accept it if your users always kept manual inventory cards along with the
computer and relied upon the manual cards instead of the computer? Eat
your own cooking.

We load up a weeks worth of tapes. Every morning we take out the previous
nights tapes and send those off to Iron Mountain. What comes back we
store until the Monday load.
We do have a different save for Monday nights. We retain Mondays for 6
weeks. The daily's for only 14 days. The quarterly's for 1 year. We set
that up and track that in BRMS. We do NOT use spreadsheets, etc tracking
which tapes expire when.

The network data is stored on ALL lpars. Lose one and you still have your
BRMS data.

From any system you can do a

WRKMEDBRM SYSNAME(GDI1.GDIHQ)
Volume Creation Expiration Move Media Dup
Serial Status Date Date Location Date Class Sts
BR0372 *ACT 12/14/13 12/09/14 IRONMTN 12/17/13 ULTRIUM4
BR0394 *ACT 03/09/13 03/04/14 IRONMTN 05/20/13 ULTRIUM4
BR0458 *ACT 06/08/13 06/03/14 IRONMTN 06/11/13 ULTRIUM4
BR0514 *ACT 09/14/13 09/09/14 IRONMTN 09/23/13 ULTRIUM4
...

From ANY system I can do

WRKOBJBRM OBJ(ERPLXF/IIM) OBJTYPE(*FILE) FROMSYS(GDI1.GDIHQ2)
Save Save
Opt Object Library Type Date Time Volume
IIM ERPLXF *FILE 3/06/13 17:13:58 BR0363
IIM ERPLXF *FILE 6/05/13 14:54:47 BR0519
IIM ERPLXF *FILE 9/11/13 13:43:48 BR0432
IIM ERPLXF *FILE 12/09/13 17:39:40 BR0329
IIM ERPLXF *FILE 12/11/13 13:22:39 BR0306
IIM ERPLXF *FILE 12/16/13 17:39:19 BR0300
IIM ERPLXF *FILE 12/23/13 17:39:01 BR0407
IIM ERPLXF *FILE 12/27/13 17:38:50 BR0304
IIM ERPLXF *FILE 12/30/13 17:39:18 BR0369
IIM ERPLXF *FILE 12/31/13 17:39:14 BR0313
...

With this kind of tracking available having prefixes indicating which tape
holds what has absolutely no value. And it just complicates the hell out
of loading your media library.

You might really benefit in your situation by having a consultant come in
and help you set this up. They do a pretty good job of getting you to
think outside of your existing strategy. We used Sirius.

We also use virtual tapes, (not save files).
We have one system that we have offsite and we do not want to physically
handle tapes there. So we use BRMS to save to virtual tape. We FTP the
tape to a system here. Then we use DUPMEDBRM (notice the BRM suffix?) to
duplicate it to physical tape. And I can still do the appropriate
WRKOBJBRM and see which tape, virtual or physical, has the object in
question. If you start trying to work around the system you'll lose all
that. If you can't handle the FTP scripts and what not IBM has a tool
that they'll gladly charge you for which will do the same thing for
virtual tapes.

I too thought our backup strategy was all oh so unique. And had to do all
sorts of gyrated commands on the media library to get our named tapes to
work for the right system. And had long strings of CL and RPG programs
for performing backups. Fought BRMS for years. Now I am a strong
advocate.

Rob Berendt