Remote Backup Question.

[Melkar]

Hello,

My question is simple.. Can we remotely backup 1 hpux 11 machine on a remote tape archive?

My tape archive is connected to an IBM AIX5.2L server.

Thanks,

MAxime

[A. Clay Stephenson]

My answer is simple. I don't know if "we" can but I know the "I" can. There are many techniques. DataProtector will do it very easily and that would be my first choice (although it's not free). You could backup using fbackup feeding a remsh pipeline that invokes dd on the IBM end. Tar and cpio could also backup through a remsh pipeline.

[Bill Hassell]

It sounds like the HP-UX box does not have a tape drive. So while you can backup the whole box, you can't restore anything if you lose the ability to boot from the system disk. Be sure you plan for a solution (like mirroring) to handle loss of the boot disk.

[Melkar]

Thanks for the replies guys, its appreciated.

I can connect my tape drive on both systems, i am just "lazy". I'd like to backup the machines each month without having to switch the tape from one computer to another.
I am thinking of doing it using cron.
I am new to all this stuff =/ I love it but having to learn UX and AIX at the same time is confusing =)

again,
thanks for the quickl replies.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

You haven't said what kind of tape drive it is but there is a way to have your cake and eat it too. If the boxes are physically located close enough then you can do this:

HP-UX host HBA (SCSI ID 7 - terminator) ------- Tape drive (SCSI ID 0) ---- (terminator - SCSI ID 6) IBM host HBA.

The tape drive is thus local to both boxes though obviously can only be used by one host at any one time. I actually use this configuration quite often.

Bill does make a good point about being about to restore a dead system. It almost sounds as though you are approaching backup as an afterthought when it should be one of your most important tasks. If you have good backups, you very seldom need them. If you don't, ....

You should really look into a product like Data Protector, it will make your life much easier.

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

HP-UX as an operating system can write to remote tape drives on systems that support such writing.

Basic HP-UX does not support writing to remote tape drives. You need a third party product like Veritas Netbackup to do that.

A cheap way to do this is to copy the file to the remote server and then fire a remesh or ssh script to do the backup. This however is extremely inefficient.

You could configure the data you want to back up as a NFS or Samba share and remotely kick a process on the IBM system that backs up the NFS. This is difficult to control as far as making sure the database you are backing up is down.

Frankly I like A. Clay's suggestion. Pay for some software to make this normal and controllable.

If you think backing up without decent software is fun, you should try disaster recovery. I've been through one disaster recovery. It was quite enough to teach me the value of good software, which we had, good configuration, which we did not have and practice, which I had done in legacy systems but nobody else had done.

SEP

[Bill Hassell]

And one important consideration about network-based backups: Today's tape drives are MUCH faster than the network. An Ultrium 960 need at least 30 Mbytes/sec to keep the tape busy, more than twice that much if the data is compressible. A standard 100Mbit network can maybe push 5-8 Mbytes/sec and this translates into serious data starvation for the tape drive. HP (and some others) are designing the very high speed tape drives to slow down for the pokey networks. This is called Data Rate Matching (DRM) and for the Ultrium 460 and 960, it goes down as slow as 25-30 Mbyte/sec, still too fast for 100Mbit LANs. If the tape drive starves for data, it must stop, backup and restart, sometimes thousands of times, which is very detrimental to throughput (100:1 drop in apparent speed or more) and not good for the mechanism.

Make sure the pipe you carry the data in is large enough so you don't break the tape drive or wear out the tapes.

[Melkar]

We have somethig prety nice for our backups. It is called exabyte VXA, combined with the Symantec Backup Exec V.10 software. This software allows me to install unix agents on unix machines like HPUX and IBM AIX.

I already use my Exabyte tape drive (with 10 tape slots in it). When i do a backup on UX/AIX i have to select all the folders through a Windows Explorer like window, i can backup the data but i am affraid that it wont save my vgs.

I decided to try the following:
mksysb my AiX (rootvg) and save everything else on a VXA tape. I am not sure how i will restore everything back tho. I have test it.

I was thinking of doing a rootvg recovery only, and then restore everything else using the exabyte but im not sure if it will work and this method does not seems very "clean" to me.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

The flaw in your plan is that all of the high-end backups assume that the filesystems or logical volumes are already there before a restore is possible. HP-UX's approach to bringing a tabula rasa to life is Ignite-UX. Essentially, an Ignite image will restore a blank machine's /dev/vg00 so that vgimports and traditional restores can take over at that point. Ignite can work in two ways, from a tape image or over the network from another HP-UX Ignite server. Do a search on Ignite for details. The machine cannot boot using just any tape drive so you need to check for Ignite compatibility.

[Melkar]

Thank you very much for your quick answer. I will look at this Ignite feature right away.