Re: Image Catalog over NFS

Hi Larry,

Thanks for your comments!

1) Yes, I backup to Linux in one site and recovered on a temporary IBM i. You can use IBM i instead of Linux, but Linux is cheaper.

2) Haven't tried, but I guess I could create the BOOTP image and copy all that information to a Linux machine and setup the TFTPD. Reading latest notes on backup to NFS docs I'm not sure NFS backups and restores are fully supported:

"This document does not describe or support complete system backup and recovery that uses media stored on an NFS server."

...but this is part of the MDM backup process.

3) IBM Cloud Object Storage can be fast using AWS CLI and S3CMD with some performance adjustments to reduce latency impact, and compression with PIGZ (gzip) to reduce the amount of data to upload. But yes, you can't upload terabytes of data every day.

4) When restoring on IBM Cloud you can use the "internal" network, usually 1GbE and 1 ms to 5 ms latency.

5) NFS performance when installing SLIC is slow, but restore is fast. Based on Mass Data Migration Device statistics with 1GbE , the transfer rate is near 110 MB/s. On IBM Cloud PowerVS you have a faster connection for NFS<-->Target server comms, but there's processing penalties, sure. In my tests the restore was fast with a fast disk, but it's not physical tape.

6) I've created this procedure for migration purposes, the cloud is not the best place for a full system recovery backup if you try to restore to on-prem.

Restoring to Cloud? It's possible, but maybe you'll need more resources: disk images, scripts and if your RTO/RPO can't wait for the restore: logical replication.

The slowest part on this recovery procedure was disk initialization on Tier3 (3 IOPs / GB). Restore wasn't bad , maybe 30 minutes.
Test machine: Power9 S922 with 0.25 CPUs uncapped, 8GB and 100GB disk (additional to the 80GB disk image). NFS was similar.