Automated backup solution advise please 1

[RSeymour]

Hello all,

This seems to be a common theme in this forum but I would appreciate some advise as to my best approach.

I run a sub department of a large enterprise with a pre-existing backup regime. However we have been allowed to step outside company guidelines and install our own server due to our non-standard requirements. As a result I need to find a backup solution for 1 server holding approx 80Gb of data (mostly Oracle and SQL dBs) and 25 laptops also with Oracle and SQL dBs. I need the laptops to backup automatically only when the machines are back in the office and not when they dial into the network (a problem I have encountered in the past) as well as having a manual backup option.

The server is brand new and should cope with any load I can place on it, with a 80Gb DLT drive installed. Backups need to be as invisible as possible for the users due to workload pressure. Full "system restore" backups are not necessarily required but registry backups of the laptops would be an advantage.

If anybody can advise me of the right product for this type of configuration your advise would be greatly appreciated.

Many thanks

Rob

 

[gwichman]

This is a somewhat tough one to answer.. I suppose the first thing you're going to have to consider is how you plan to back up all those databases. How big are they? Can you afford to back them up cold (at least for the laptops)? Buying 25+ software agents may get real expensive fast when a simple shutdown/startup script could give you the backup you desire just fine (an agent allows you to back them up while they are up and running). I suspect you're ok with the laptops backing up cold while the server you may prefer a hot backup on (online backup).

A big question you left out is what OS is running on your laptops.

The only tricky thing per say is probably the fact that you want the laptops to back up automatically when they plug into a network, but only the office network. I doubt there's a way to do this out of the box. You'll more then likely need to script something, either via a perl script or VB script, or write a program that periodically runs in the background (ideally as a daemon or service) to poll what network it's on and launch the backup appropriately.

The difficult thing isn't having it automatically run the backup, but rather be able to interpret what network it's on. Most products i've seen will back up if they see the backup server and are scheduled to run a backup PERIOD. Running a backup will always put a load on the laptop (of course) to some extent. If you have to shut down the database to back it up (see first question), does this imply the laptop is unusuable to the user?

I'm willing to bet the best product to do what you want is Tivoli Storage Manager. It's expensive but offers some advantages. You could back up your file systems as it would only back up the files that have changed since the last back up (it does incremental backups forever in the case of normal files). The typical installation of a TSM server will have a "disk pool" which means your backups would not have to wait for a tape to mount to perform a backup. The data goes to disk first when backing up to the TSM server. Thus if 4 laptops plugged in at the same time and started backing up, there is no tape contention or tape drive waiting issues. It has very scriptable clients you can work around if you want to customize it in any way as mentioned above (it wouldn't be hard to write a script that checks what network it's on and aborts the backup if it's not on the right one. It wouldnt be hard to script the stopping/starting of a database before/after a backup either).

the drawback is you'll need someone who knows TSM fairly well for it to work well. TSM knowledge is directly proportional to how smoothly it'll all go. Or spend a lot of time on support with them (at least they have good support). It's also pricey like i said. But it has terrific DR/offsite capabilities and so much customization that there may very well be more you like about it then what little i'm mentioning.

 

[RSeymour]

Thanks gwichman, that is an excellent response. In answer to some of your questions:

Unfortunately the client machines will need to be able to backup while in use due to the nature of the work being performed. Looks like client agents are going to be needed unless you have any further ideas.

All the machines involved are Windows 2000 Pro except the server which is Windows 2000 Server. We are looking at moving to XP and 2003 Server over the next 6-12 months so any solution would ideally cover as many of these OS's as possible.

One possibility for controlling the backup trigger (only running while actually pluged into the LAN and not while dialled in) is that we have our own subnet in the office, but when you dial in you get an IP address from the wider office network. Do you know if it is possible to set IP address range as a criteria for triggering a backup?

The dBs range in size from very small (40Mb SQL databases) to reasonably large (Oracle dBs with about 4Gb of table space).

I have never struck Tivoli before, all my previous experience has been with ARCBackup, but it does sound good. Can you recommend a site with some in-depth info regarding scripts?

Many thanks for your help

Rob

 

[gwichman]

Hmm if I were in your shoes i'd probably also investigate if Backup Exec can do what you want particularly since you're entirely windows based. BE is even used by microsoft from what i understand and i've had descent experiences with Veritas support.

As for using the IP/subnet to trigger the backup, surely that would be easy to do simply by making it so when dialed in you cannot access the backup server. How you'd implement that specifically depends on your environment of course. There is nothing in the backup client software that would allow it to be able to tell if it's on one subnet vs another and backup appropriately though. You'd have to do it in a round-about way. Either the two subnets can't talk to one another, or put the backup server on a 3rd subnet and set your router/switch to only allow the in-office subnet to talk to that 3rd subnet, but not the dialed in subnet. Or you could write a script or something that does an IPCONFIG, determines what subnet it's on and launches the backup as needed. Any of these ideas seem workable it's just a question of which fits your situation best. Handling it at the network level would be ideal since you then wouldn't have to implement anything special on the laptops because you KNOW they simply can't talk ot the backup server while dialed in anyways.

It shouldn't be hard to contact an IBM business partner and have them demo Tivoli if you're interested in it. I can't really recommend a site with info regarding scripts as there is no such site really. There's a listserv where you could ask questions related to it thats very popular and has a lot of great TSM folk. There's also a site called

http://www.adsm.org

that has forums as well as a search engine to search old posts to the listserv. There are also a few other sites that escape me at the moment that have scripts here and there. I could recommend a TSM contractor if you were looking for someone that i know is good to perform the initial install and help you come up with a solution. But probably before you go that far you might want to see whether a cheaper product like Backup Exec might do what you want as well. I'm not a big fan of Arcserv personally. CA's support leaves something to be desired.

One alternative possibility with your DB's is if the DB allows you to backup the database to disk (a lot of DB's do), you then wouldn't need an agent. Just have the DB periodically dump itself to some spare disk space, then let the backup program back up that folder. This is the poor mans hot backup (or online backup) and often makes more fiscal sense then purchasing an agent when dealing with smaller databases (it's basically a question of whether the disk space you'll use is more or less expensive then the cost of the agent you're planning on buying).

 

[RSeymour]

Thanks so much for your advise, it is very much appreciated.

Rob

 

[MostlyNuts]

It may be worth, if your investigating everyone, looking at Legato also. MS uses them for the Hotmail backup internally and I have had as good an experience with them as with Veritas, better in some cases.
Just my 0.02

Cheers

 

[29rosemont]

I think Retrospect server will do the job too. It will backup laptops when they connect to the LAN, and the subnet or specific IP can be defined for the client. There is also an Open file backup option which will work with most DBs.

 

[RSeymour]

Tahnks everyone