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Disaster Recovery using Ignite

 
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Tim Nelson
Honored Contributor

Disaster Recovery using Ignite

This is more of a generic question for a situation we have had problems with.
Scenario: use make_recovery -A to create an Ignite tape of our T520 system. Send tape off-site to DR vendor to boot tape on another T520 system. The DR vendor is having problems getting the tape to load properly. We have used the same tape here on the T520 it was build on and it loads the OS just fine. The DR vendor then used the same Ignite tape and loaded the OS just fine on a K-series server. Again this is just a generic question to see if anyone else has had problems with T-series servers and Ignite in a disaster test ? Thanks
6 REPLIES 6
paul courry
Honored Contributor

Re: Disaster Recovery using Ignite

Perhaps this is more of a question for the HP-UX forum.
Varghese Mathew
Trusted Contributor
Solution

Re: Disaster Recovery using Ignite

Hi,

Its not clear what kind of errors you have received while trying to recover the T520 on the DR Site, is it related to Tape drive problem / or anything else ??

In case you can throw more light on this, it may help ..

Cheers !!!
boley janowski
Trusted Contributor

Re: Disaster Recovery using Ignite

Tim,

I was just at the sunguard DR site in Philly, about 2 weeks ago, we had to recover to a couple or T boxes while I was there and found out that the scsi cables that are run from the T box is actually a single ended cable going to a junction box of some sort and then run to the T box its self. The problem with this is that when you exceed a six foot length from controler to termination on a single ended type of connection you will start to get erroneous errors, this will still work sometimes but is not reliable. I mention this because while we were there most all the tapes we had were acting as if they were bad, when we had tested most of them at our site as good. That is when I discovered how they were using the single ended scsi devices. After I discovered this I had them take the correct type of tape drive (at least DDS2 tape drives, they gave us some DDS1 drives as well, useless) and connect it directly to the server in there control area so that the distance was only a couple of feet as apposed to the 50+ feet they had initially given us, and had them clean the tape drive again. All of the sudden our tapes were good again.

Check this out, make sure the tape drives are local to the sever, they are the correct type of drive, they have been cleaned, and they are terminated properly at the DR site and your tapes should work fine, if they work at your site.

Good Luck!!
Tim Nelson
Honored Contributor

Re: Disaster Recovery using Ignite

The errors received when booting the IGNITE tape on a T520 at the DR site were two different ones. On the first couple occasions we were getting messages about a bad LIF file. On another occasion messages about no archive existed occured. When the same tape was taken to a K580 everything worked well. When the same tape was used at home on a T520 all was also well. Currently my thinking is that the T520 at the DR site was using a DDS3 tape unit. This has yet to be confirmed. We have a test scheduled for September which we will attempt again to boot an IGNITE tape ourselves and experience the errors in person. Any other experiences would be appreciated or at least a wish of luck.. Thanks for the responses.
boley janowski
Trusted Contributor

Re: Disaster Recovery using Ignite

see the fact that you go two different errors on a tape that you test and was able to get working would suggest to me that they have either exceed the optimal disstance on the scsi cable from controler to termination, or that they have a bad drive. Just because you get different errors doesn't mean its the tape, once you exceed a scsi device optimal distance you will get stange/differnt errors. let us know what you find.