Re: Where do I learn about SAN backup?

Thanks everyone for your input.

I've been chasing this down on my own after all your comments and I've come to some initial conclusions that I'll be bringing back to the business.

It looks like there are some very powerful possibilities here, and given the integration of FlashCopy to BRMS it makes it almost a no-brainer, except maybe for the learning curve.  The biggest question I have is whether all of this magic is:

A) Only possible with a SAN
B) Possible with non-SAN but much easier with SAN
C) Little or no difference between SAN and non-SAN

We're talking low double-digits TB here, and a whole lot of that is IFS documents, so I'm just trying to get my arms around the overall cost/benefit arguments of a SAN.

Thanks again, everyone!



On 8/24/2017 7:59 PM, PaulMmn wrote:

And I disagree with one of Steve's statements.  See below (I've rearranged some of Steve's comments).
--Paul E Musselman

The physical amount of disk space on the SAN used by BACKUP, is directly related to the amount of data blocks which changed on PRODUCTION after the flash copy started.  No data is copied between partitions.

    I disagree.

(...)

There are several possible events:

(...)

The data is duplicated in blocks, not bytes.  The SAN has a bit table with one bit for every block of data in the LPAR.  So if you're planning to change 10 bytes in a data block, the entire block is copied to the Backup LPAR.  Then your 10 bytes is updated.  If the same data space in the Production LPAR has already been updated, there is already a copy of that data in the Backup LPAR; it is only copied once.


--Paul E Musselman