The one topic no one is mentioning is Disaster Recovery. It's very hard to collocate an offsite pool. The only way to reduce the number of tape mounts is to do some type of full backup periodically (either backup or archive).
I started doing "full backups" of SAP filesystems after doing a DR with two 3590-B11's as my 3494 tape library. After 1800 tape mounts to restore /saparch, something had to be done. Watching TSM restore 1 file from each tape made it imperative. "Full backups" was the something (Note the quotes - see below). Taking "full backups" periodically drastically reduces the number of tape mounts needed to restore at a DR, since the data should not spread across more tapes than the number of days since the last full backup. So our 1800 mounts above comes down to 7, if weekly fulls are taken of the systems. Now comes the argument of "That's duplicating a lot of data!" Yes, it does. So figure out what needs to be restored in this way (the answer is "Not all of /saparch" for you SAP accounts out there) to bring the system back up in case of a disaster. Work with data owners to see what they need back immediately, and what can wait until after the system is back online and running. There's more in that second list than you may think! My "Full Backups" are therefore weekly archives of critical path data, which are kept for 2 weeks. At a DR, I do a retrieve, then a restore of the incremental data since the archive (then I script the retrieve and restore, just to speed it up even more, but that's a different thread). Nick Cassimatis [EMAIL PROTECTED] Today is the tomorrow of yesterday.
