I agree, Betsy, that in-sourcing this isn't an option. Backups are
boring, costly and more work than one thinks. (Also... as has been
said on this mailing list many times, "RAID is not a backup solution".
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/01/02/data-loss-dooms-blog-hosting-service/
)
When you go in to negotiate it you have a lot of power:
1. Their economics are false savings for your group. Unlike other
people, you have very little restore needs. 1-2 per month, and always
a single file. That means saving tape is going to be more important
than saving restore time.
2. Who are your allies? Other departments should be concerned with
the strategy they use because it lowers the centralized IT
department's (labor) costs and raises costs that get passed on to the
customer. You could request the new policy, and if they rebuff you,
let them know that you will go to other departments suggest that they
all come back and renegotiate collectively, and that if you get your
way, you won't tell the other departments. If this fails, it is
important to actually come back with other departments and negotiate
the change.
3. What is this centralize's groups drivers and how can you help meet
them? Are they driven by cost or revenue? If it is cost, show them
that your usage pattern creates very little labor for them and that
this proposed strategy would have even lower labor costs for them
(fewer tape changes, maybe?). Address it as a strategy that benefits
them.
4. Doesn't Legato have a self-service restore mechanism? Maybe if
they purchased it, the labor cost would drop and they could be more
flexible about different strategies.
5. If their technology is lame (no D2D or D2D2T), maybe they would
appreciate an offer of assistance exploring those technologies.
Which reminds me...
The BSD man page for dump recommends a Towers of Nanoi algorithm. To
be honest, I never really understood it. However, the page was
written by very smart people and it may be better than 9,8,7,6,5,4,...
or 1,2,3,4,5,...
o After a level 0, dumps of active file systems (file systems
with files that change, depending on your partition layout some
file systems may contain only data that does not change) are
taken on a daily basis, using a modified Tower of Hanoi algo-
rithm, with this sequence of dump levels:
3 2 5 4 7 6 9 8 9 9 ...
For the daily dumps, it should be possible to use a fixed num-
ber of tapes for each day, used on a weekly basis. Each week,
a level 1 dump is taken, and the daily Hanoi sequence repeats
beginning with 3. For weekly dumps, another fixed set of tapes
per dumped file system is used, also on a cyclical basis.
Does that help?
Tom
_______________________________________________
Tech mailing list
[email protected]
http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech
This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators
http://lopsa.org/
