I have looked at your Backup/Recovery code, quite extensive.

1) With the use of a software encryption product (I think it is currently

called VM/Encrypt, Dave, help), and a modified PIPEDDR, I was able to wri
te
encrypted backup tapes and restore them at our DR exercise last summer. J
ust
about when DOE decided on a hardware only solution.

2) So true. I was actually thinking of a PIPEDDR type server to run at bo
th
sides of a DR connection, that acted like a backup server at production,
with scheduled jobs that fired off workers to read each minidisk,
full-volume, snapshot volume and send compressed data across the net to t
he
recovery server at the hotsite which would fire off workers to receive ea
ch
stream and write the data back to disk. I was thinking of a VM based serv
er
but it could be a linux server with some VM workers to handle snapshot
requests and SVM shutdown/xautolog requests from a linux scheduler. But b
oth
would require more effort than I can give it. (Anyone got a product
development team that needs some work?)

/Tom Kern
/U.S. Dept of Energy
/301-903-2211


On Tue, 17 Jun 2008 12:49:39 -0400, Michael Coffin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]
om>
wrote:

>Hi Tom,
>
>Yep, I have that all covered.  This is actually a DR process that I
>developed about 8 years ago (and have been improving over the years)
>that is a complete "soup to nuts" system, automating both the backups
>AND the recovery.  The system assumes a "worst case scenario" where
>computer center is gone, and all of the people having detailed knowledge

>of the system are likewise "gone", it allows someone with virtually no
>knowledge about the specifics of the system being recovered and very
>minimal mainframe knowledge to fully recover the system.  When we
>conduct DR drills we typically recruit a management type that has
>minimal computing skills and little specific knowledge about the system
>(someone we affectionately refer to as the "monkey boy", with the
>understanding that a slightly trained monkey could actually complete
>this task) to actually conduct the recovery.  The programming staff
>provides no input to the "monkey boy", instead taking notes of anything
>in the documentation that they found unclear and/or any technical
>problems that may arise.  The entire process is menu-driven and pretty
>slick (including a Recovery Monitor that reports what each DDR slave is
>doing, what's it's ETA to completion of the current task is, what the
>total ETA to full system recovery is, the ability to quiesce and restart

>slaves/streams/devices, etc.).
>
>In 2006 there was a massive flood in Washington DC that required
>implementation of this DR Plan.  I'm pleased to say it worked without a
>hitch, and from the time we got the green light to start spinning tapes
>we were back up in running in something like 3 or 4 hours (I think we
>had about 20 DDR slaves running simultaneously).  While this process
>works extremely well, I now want to remove tapes from the process -
>there are a number of reasons why this makes sense:
>
>1.  There is a Federal mandate to encrypt all removable media which this

>site is subject to, and we don't presently have TS1120 tape
>drives/cartridges.
>
>2.  Tapes can be lost and/or damaged (damage used to happen with
>ALARMING frequency!), one bad tape and your entire recovery could be
>jeapordized.
>
>Ultimately, I'd like to have our production DASD replicate (either in
>realtime or via a nightly batch job) to a remote DASD array using PPRC -

>but until such time as I get funding to do that (perhaps never!) I need
>to eliminate the darned tapes.  :)
>
>-Mike

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