Backup storage and mirror

[Oliver Schmitz]

Dear all,

I am running a C3600 WS with HP-UX 11.i TCOE. This WS serves several functionality to our workgroup: Usage of many different programs up to data acquisition and webserving. I would like to mirror my heterogeneous operating system as well as the data stored on this maschine (and the data on some other hp-ux maschine inside the acquisition cluster).

Do anyone have a good suggestion about a proper way to do this? I thought about a SCSI hot-swap system with 8 HDs. What do you think about this? I would be able to mirror my OS to a HD and replace the origin one in case of error and damage. The big amounts of data could be stored aswell the one of the remote systems. Everything would be as fast as possible (in contrast to a DAT).

Is there a good software to manage this tasks (I now about dd, but want to take something more convenient). I know about ignite. Is this recommended for such purposes?

As you see I have already some ideas but I want to ask the auditorium wether they are good or if there are some better solutions. Exspecially the software point is important.

Thanks for a little consulting in this tasks.

Best regrads,

Oliver

[Elmar P. Kolkman]

If you have the licenses, I would say: use LVM mirroring. Especially for the vg00, making it possible to boot of your extra disks. If that is not a possibility, use ignite to have good tapes to restore vg00 if something happens to it. Keep a copy of this tape offsite, to be able to restore even if the site has a problem.

As for the other data, if you can't mirror, you could use backup tools to backup to disk or to a remote system. Depending on your budget you could use freeware software like Amanda or commercial software like Networker or Data Protector. Backup to other systems is safer, while local mirroring makes the system more fault-tolerant. Remember to monitor, because a system with a failing disk will keep on running... until the other disk fails too. And Murphy is never far away when disks can fail ;-)

Hope this answers your question.