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DR using Ignite-UX, no local tape drive available

 
malc_p
Occasional Advisor

DR using Ignite-UX, no local tape drive available

Hi All

Sorry if I sound confused - it's because I am.

I'm an Informix DBA and my job and the product I work on has been relocated to a company where they have no HP admins. My HP knowledge is limited to day-to-day stuff - maintain filesystems and simple stuff like that; but now all system admin is entirely down to me and all I have is the online PDFs and the forums to use for reference.

Anyway, they want me to set up a DR of this system - basically, its an HP-UX 11iV3 system on Itanium, with all the volume groups built on the comany SAN (which hosts many other machines). My machine has no tape drive but the SAN itself is backed up to tape by the SAN admins separately.

DR is to assume that the primary site is wiped off the face of the Earth and there is no netwotk access to it. All we have is a DR site with blank machines and a tape drive on its SAN.

Now; to do DR I'm going to need to use IGNITE-UX, I believe, but I don't think this setup allows me to use make_tape_recovery, correct?

So - I need make_net_recovery to backup to a path on the SAN?

How am I going to recover this to a completely bare and blank Itanium server and SAN at a remote site using the SAN tape(s)?

 

Thanks!

1 REPLY 1
Bill Hassell
Honored Contributor

Re: DR using Ignite-UX, no local tape drive available

The problem is misunderstanding that backing up all the files will make a bootable system. It won't. Unless the SAN tape backup is done with some special raw format where every track is backed up (and can be restored), none of your systems will be bootable after the smoke and rubble event has occured. This isn't just HP-UX. Windows, Linux, VMware, none of it will be bootable unless the SAN storage is being imaged in the background by special array syncing software.

 

It is a common misunderstanding that a tape backup/restore will be enough. The term bare-metal recovery is used to describe the smoke and rubble scenario. The special tracks at the beginning of boot disks cannot be backed up as files. A proper DR design is one that works and there is no substitute for DR rehearsals. I would be very concerned that the current design needs professional advice to be successful.



Bill Hassell, sysadmin