Thanks
The kind of stuff I was looking for.
Being old, I do not favor transmitting data over communications. It
usually is higher overhead then transmission over hardware.
i.e. transmission over IP, to get to escon-tape, instead of just
writting to tape.
And that got reinforced with my experiences with real LAN systems. I
would be trying to fix a mainframe problem, by dialing into an IP
connection, and find I can't get anything done because the LAN people
are backing up servers over the LAN. So either the mainframe sat, or I
had to come in for a coax session. In this case, I finally talked a LAN
guy to come in at midnight - 1 AM and check the network performance.
The light-weight tools he had showed collisions being 90+ percent of the
transmissions.
No wonder it seemed that I never got any tn3270 packets.
But it took them 2 years to do anything about it, so I'm still really
negative about using communications to do transfers. But Ill get over
it, eventually.
Like I said, the more I read about Amanda, the more I want to use it the
way it was ment to be.
But I'm still not convinced that Amanda is/will be our backup solution.
TSM initially sounded good, but it required scsi attached tape drives
(i.e. FCP attached), and at this point, I don't want to have separate
FICON and FCP attached tape drives. Right now, due to cost and I don't
perceive the need. In a year or two, that may change.
Tom Duerbusch
THD Consulting
David Boyes wrote:
On Tue, Jun 07, 2005 at 12:54:38PM -0500, Tom Duerbusch wrote:
Using Amanda in a traditional network world, Amanda would be running on
a server with tape drives and the clients will be running on other
images and the backups are taken over the network. Sure, saves on tape
drives.
But on a mainframe, each image can own the tape drives.
I'm wondering (pros and cons) if anyone has made every Linux image, an
Amanda server and just back up its self. No network envolved. It seems
like it would be more efficient, but then....I think there would be a
lot of unknowns of how things work when you actually need something
restored (or your image rebuilt).
You could do it this way, but part of the convenience of tools like
Amanda is that that Amanda database keeps track of what file is on
what tape -- and if everybody's doing their own backups to a database
in the same server, it's a real PITA if that server gets destroyed and
the Amanda database goes with it.
That's kind of the point of the client/server model; the client
servers don't need to retain all that state information, the server is
the only place you need to worry about it. Recovery is a lot easier in
that scenario: you just need to restore the Amanda server, and then
restore everything else from that image. If you separate the backup
server from the clients you can also shut it down and get a absolutely
clean image backup of it with DDR or similar tools w/o interrupting
production work.
Third, you'd have to do all the TMS and tape management integration
for every server. Getting tape drives on and offline to Linux is still
a PITA, even if you use the tape mount widget we wrote. Do you really
want to have to do all that work for every guest when you can create
private LAN segments with one command?
Or maybe Amanda just won't run this way.
It will. It's just a lot more work to do it that way for no real
benefit.
-- db
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