RE: BRMS Backup Strategy and Implementation

I agree with Rob and went through all the same issues.
You need to trust BRMS.
We had someone come in and help setup BRMS back in 2006.
We have a 8205 with 3 LPARS, TS3200 3573-LU4, 4 drives and we use LTO5 media.
We also have a Brocade fiber channel switch, all drives available to all LPARs at any time.

Everything is scheduled via AJS, the only manual steps unload and load of tapes, BRMS movement tells us which ones.
All scratch volumes in one pool, we don't assign volumes to an LPAR.
We do have various media and move policies for the various saves.
This controls that we are appended to the correct volume, moved and expired properly.
On production, we do a full save while active every night, followed by an auto dup.
We have a combination of 45 day, 396 day (Weekly cycle save, keep for 13 months) and Perm Saves (All Month End and System Saves) keep permantly.
We also use append and auto dup.
With auto dup, the original volumes never leave the library, only the duplicated volumes when movement is run.
With append, we get full use of every volume in the library.
Movement runs every M-F 9:00 am, auto dup volumes are taken offsite.

This all didn't happen overnight, many years of learning and tweaking.

Paul



-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Jerry Draper
Sent: Monday, February 03, 2014 2:49 PM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Re: BRMS Backup Strategy and Implementation

This pretty much sums up our experience as well. I would heartily endorse the idea of taking Rob's leap of faith in trusting BRMS and getting rid of any kind of tape naming convention.

Jerry

On 2/3/2014 11:25 AM, rob@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

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

--
Jerome Draper, Trilobyte Software Systems, since 1976 iSeries, Network, and Connectivity Specialists -- iSeries, LAN/WAN/VPN Representing WinTronix, Synapse, Netopia, HiT, and others .....
(415) 457-3431; www.trilosoft.com

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