BRMS Backup Strategy and Implementation

Laura,

We run a full save, every night, all libraries, save while active, with append, and auto dup.
We have little activity late evening, so save while active works well for us, allows the few users to continue their tasks
Occasionally, we may get a lock from one our apps that is doing an exclusive lock on a data area.
I use MPLUS to do an auto retry of those rare occasions.
Save while active does not work well for IFS objects, no retry, they are simply skipped.
We do not use Domino.

Paul

-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of LRoberts@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Wednesday, February 05, 2014 1:36 PM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: ***SpamTagPSI: Re: BRMS Backup Strategy and Implementation
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Thank you to everyone who gave me some insight in how you are using BRMS.

I am wondering if most people using BRMS are taking advantage of the save while active and the Lotus Domino feature save while active ?

Does anymore have any pros and cons to using either ? Any things to watch out for or issues in restoring ?

We are doing our yearly DR test next month which we have proven successful in the past, but next year the plan for our DR test is to restore using BRMS so will be a whole new ball game ......

Thanks again

Laura











From: Jerry Draper <midrangel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
<midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Date: 03/02/2014 01:49 PM
Subject: Re: BRMS Backup Strategy and Implementation
Sent by: <midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx>



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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