Hi, Jose. If they need every single version kept for 5 years, perhaps your company should be looking into a code/document versioning system, rather than a backup/archive solution. A versioning system will give them a lot more flexibility as far as keeping metadata or an index that could make version lookups (finding which version you want) much easier.
If it's just basically because of a CYA issue, they just want to have it just in case, well, any requirement can be met with enough money. You could do a cost analysis on how often your files are currently changing and their average sizes, then estimate the cost incurred by the extra tapes and servers and libraries (I'd include a new server or two over 5 years to "accommodate growth"). For example, in my CATIA environment (engineering models), I'm getting about an overall 5% change rate per night (seems high to me, but what do I know about engineering?). So, that's about 50,000 objects/200GB backed up per night, at about an average size of 4MB/object. So if I were to keep every backup for 5 years, it'd cost.... 200GB/night, *365.25*5=365TB. I wouldn't do that with my 9840's, too expensive on carts, so I'd probably use a larger technology like LTO (or LTO2 when available) for a tier2 nextstgpool primary stgpool, so use 2x compression, 200GB/cart=1800 carts, +offsite copy=3600 carts additional, and I like having an additional onsite copypool, so 5400 carts. Do the same for my other environments, we're getting really darned big. (I'm doing about 800GB-1TB/night.) Add in the fact I'd have to buy LTO drives, convert my 2nd gripper in the 9310 to handle LTO, add your per-port fibre switch cost, maintenance contracts, we're talking pretty darned expensive. You can estimate your %change by counting all the files on a platform (normally your OS can give you those numbers) and check the accounting log or the dsmsched.log to find out how many objects backed up over the last Y days and average versus amount backed up. Who knows, you may even be able to massage the numbers to require a huge new library, implement a SAN for sharing it and the drives, make sure you cost an STK library so you can buy the Gresham EDT software to further inflate the price, yatta yatta, submit that to management, and most likely get the whole requirement downsized or even eliminated altogether. Anyway, regarding your numbered options: 1) Meets the requirement, for cost see above. I don't think you need to worry too much about database size, but if you do run into database problems, that's where you're covered by estimating in a new server or two to split the load. 2) Won't meet the requirement of every backup for 5 years because it'll only get monthly snapshots, everything backed up intra-month will be lost. It may even cost more because a month of incrementals usually doesn't add up to as much tape as a monthly full backup. 3) Same as 2. Plus it takes a bit more work to get a single version of a single file. And you'll probably need a separate management scheme. And you'd have to do two copies to accommodate a tape failure. 4) That works, but you'd be doing two backups from each client, one to populate your recovery TSM, one to populate your retention TSM. And you're still subject to the costing outlined above. 5) Won't meet the requirement because an intra-day user initiated backup won't get caught. And you're still subject to the costs above, and even more, because you can't do incremental archives (unless you manually script them.) Alex Paschal Storage Administrator Freightliner, LLC (503) 745-6850 phone/vmail -----Original Message----- From: Rivera, Jose Spri [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Monday, February 03, 2003 6:21 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: TSM Question Hi - Wondering if I can get ideas or suggestions We need to retain all backups for a 5 year period. I currently have a retention period for backups of 180Days. We are debating the scenarios - Wondering if I can poll the list to get possible suggestions or ideas for handling this. Some things that we have been discussing are 1) extend the retention period to 5 years and set nolimit to versions created.. deleted etc 2) create separate mgmtclass for once a month backups with retention period of 5 years 3) generate backupsets once a month and retain for 5 years 4) create separate TSM instance to provide 5 year retention 5) Using archive with 5 year retention Would appreciate any ideas and potential ramifications I currently have 180 unix and intel clients, storing 15TB onsite and 15TB offsite. My db is approx 55GB I am using TSM 5.1.5.4 on an IBM RS/6000 (H80 with 6cpus and 8GBs of ram) running AIX 5.1ML03. Attached are 2 x3584 with 8 LTO fibre drives for backups. For archive I use 3494 library (L12 and D12 with 4x3590H1a drives). Thanks Jose Rivera Unix Technical Consultant ********************************************************************* This message and any attachments is solely for the intended recipient. If you are not the intended recipient, disclosure, copying, use or distribution of the information included in this message is prohibited -- Please immediately and permanently delete.
