Have you looked at replication of those remote sites as opposed to backup of the sites directly?
For those sites that could use a storage replication device to replace the file server (Netapp, Data Domain,...) and replicate it to possibly a central or hub sites. Then back up from there? Replace the file server with a NAS CIFS device and let it do the replication. If you use a solution like Netapp, snapshots can even be your backup solution for the site. Possibly "cloud" solutions. An example could be CarbonCopy and DATTO. Just to name them as examples as opposed to recommending those specific products. Or (and I can't believe I'm going to suggest this!) Microsoft DFS replication. Just some other thoughts on the subject.... Bill -----Original Message----- From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Bent Christensen Sent: Wednesday, January 16, 2013 11:25 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [ADSM-L] TSM 1st full backup of remote low-bandwidth nodes Andy, I do not totally agree with you here. The main issue for us is to get all 107 remote sites converted to TSM reasonably fast to save maintenance and service fees on the existing backup solutions. With the laptop server solution we predict the turn-around time for each laptop to be around 2 weeks, which includes sending the laptop to the remote site, back up all data, send the laptop back to the backup center, export the node. With say 10 laptops this will take at least 6 months. We could buy more laptops but we cannot charge the expenses to the remote sites, and we are stuck with the laptops afterwards ... Disaster restores is a very different ball game. Costs will not be a big issue and we have approved plans for recovering any remote site within 48 hours, which for a few sites includes chartering an aircraft to transport hardware and a technician. - Bent -----Original Message----- From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Huebner, Andy Sent: Tuesday, January 15, 2013 5:17 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [ADSM-L] TSM 1st full backup of remote low-bandwidth nodes You should use the same method to seed the first backup as you plan to use to restore the data. When you look at it that way a laptop and big external drive is not that expensive. Andy Huebner -----Original Message----- From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Bent Christensen Sent: Tuesday, January 15, 2013 9:37 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [ADSM-L] TSM 1st full backup of remote low-bandwidth nodes Hi, We are starting up a backup consolidation project where we are going to implement TSM 6.3 clients in all our 100+ remote sites and having them back up over the WAN to a few well-placed TSM backup datacenters. We have been through similar projects with selected sites a few times before, but this time the sites are larger and the bandwidth/latency worse, so there is little room for configuration mishaps ;-) One question always pops up early in the process: How are we going to do the first full TSM backup of the remote site nodes? So far we have tried: - copy data from the new node (include all attributes and permissions) to USB-disks, mount those on a TSM server (as drive X) and do a 'dsmc incr \\newnode\z$ -snapshotroot=X:\newnode_zdrive -asnodename=newnode'. This works OK and only requires a bunch of cheap high capacity USB disks, but our experience is that when we afterwards do the first incremental backup of the new node then 20-40 % of the files get backed up again - and we can't figure out why. - build a temp TSM laptop server, send it to the remote site, direct first full backup to this server, send it back to the backup datacenter and export the node(s). Nice and easy, but requires a lot of expensive laptops (and USB disks, the remote sites typically contain 2 to 10 TB of file data) to finish the project in a reasonable time frame. So how are you guys doing the first full backup of a remote node when using the WAN is not an option? - Bent
