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Re: Golden Archive as Disaster Recovery backup?

 

Golden Archive as Disaster Recovery backup?

We have installed a new Superdome 2, and I am tasked with creating a Disaster Recovery backup of it to send off-site and use to rebuild the system in the event our computer room is destroyed. We already have some rx8640's with internal DAT tape drives on which I simply run make_tape_recovery weekly, but the Superdome has no local tape drive.

Reading through the Ignite Administration Guide, it appears that I can create a bootable archive image of the system on a DVD using make_sys_image followed by make_media_install. (Of course, the DVD drive in the Superdome 2 isn't writable, so I'll have to move the image to a system with a writable DVD to do it.) My question is how complete an image of the root disk will this be? With make_tape_recovery I could tell it to back up all of root, but there is no such option with make_sys_image. Is this bootable golden archive really a suitable DR backup?

I know that I could write DR backups to an Ignite Server with make_net_recovery, but I currently have no Ignite Server. Plus in a major disaster I would then have to recover the Ignite Server before recovering my other servers.

 

Thanks,

Randy 

1 REPLY 1
Bill Hassell
Honored Contributor

Re: Golden Archive as Disaster Recovery backup?

A DVD is far too small to hold a vg00 backup. Your Itanium2 SuperDome needs a tape drive -- that system is far too expensive to not get a tape drive for it (and for the SuperDome at the DR site). Creating all the DVDs will be clumsy and certainly can't be automated. That means that when you need to setup the DR site, your only set of DVDs may be weeks, possibly months old. The better alternative is to setup an Ignite server at both sites. An rx2660 is quite inexpensive, needs only internal disks to backup a dozen or more servers. Now the Ignite backups can be fully automated, perhaps every week. You'll need a couple of tape drives, one to backup the local Ignite network server, and the other at the DR site. Or you can use rsync to keep the local and DR site in sync. Since the Ignite data only needs an occasional sync, a slow link to the DR site will be adequate to keep the DR site ready.
 
And don't forget the most important part: a complete DR operation plan followed by regular rehearsals. You don't want to find out in the middle of smoke-and-rubble that your DR backups don't work properly. If you have an identical Itanium2 at the DR site, then the restore should be quite easy. If the hardware at the DR site is not the same, plan to spend a lot of time working on the DR plan. The I2 SuperDome is quite a bit different than previous SuperDomes.



Bill Hassell, sysadmin