We don't come down for backups... We're 24/7 - the docs tend to want their lab results in a timely manner. We come down once a month for PM and that can be (and has been) rescheduled because of medical reasons, such as a transplant. We're usually down under 2 hours per month.
We run HP-UX 11.0, and UV 9.5. We used to use Logical Volume Manager (LVM) and MirrorDisk/UX to handle the drives. To run a backup we'd split the mirrors, backup the stale part and re-merge them. There were drawbacks to this method though. Either you had to have 3 mirror parts, or be running on a single part when split, and the re-merging of the mirrors took a few minutes. We did NOT have to have everyone off the system for the splits or the merges. When we moved to HP-UX 11.0, we also purchased OnlineJFS. This is a Veritas product HP sells. With it I can make drive changes on-the-fly both - both increases and decreases provided contiguous free space exists to reduce it. It also has the ability to analyze and defrag a filesystem online. But the really nice feature is taking a 'snapshot' of a filesystem. When you snapshot you get another virtual filesystem that has an image of how the filesystem looks at that moment. All writes to the filesystem actually go to the snapshots logical volume. Since only the writes go to the snapshot, it's volume only needs to be large enough to hold the writes themselves. The app can read and write as normal to it's regular volumes never knowing the difference. Vxfs and OnlineJFS handle it without the app knowing. When you undo a snapshot, the stored writes get written to the real volume to "catch up". Again this happens transparently to the application. We still use MirrorDisk/UX but now we never split the mirrors. Since we're talking about a journalled filesystem, when the snapshot completes the filesystem is in a consistent state. That's not to say that UV couldn't be caching something itself that's not on disk. For us that's a smaller issue than taking the system down to do backups, something we haven't done in the 9 years I've been here. We run 3 production-only backups and a full system (plus Novell and NT/SQL) backups every day. I've got 28 backups from the past week, plus every Sunday system backup of the last month, and every monthly backup from the past year should I need to restore. To handle the backups themselves, we're using HP Data Protector (formerly known as OmniBack) though licensing can be a little high depending on backup devices, and what you're backing up. To handle the snapshots at backup, I write shell scripts that does it and put them into the pre-exec and post-exec of the jobs. DP knows via return code from the scripts whether something went wrong and logs it appropriately. Robert >>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] 03/08/04 06:41AM >>> I doubt there is a method that will allow backup a UV database without stopping it and getting everybody off the system. If you have a mirrored system you could split the mirrors, backup the mirror and then remerge the mirrors but you would need to get everybody off the system for the split. My 2 cents? Louis ----- Original Message ----- From: "Armon Group" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Monday, March 08, 2004 8:19 PM Subject: UV - Database backup : etc : : _________________________________________________________________ : It's fast, it's easy and it's free. Get MSN Messenger today! : http://www.msn.co.uk/messenger : : -- : u2-users mailing list : [EMAIL PROTECTED] : http://www.oliver.com/mailman/listinfo/u2-users : -- u2-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.oliver.com/mailman/listinfo/u2-users -- u2-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.oliver.com/mailman/listinfo/u2-users
