Disk-2-Disk (Replicated) To Tape

[Jer2224]

Hi,

Have been hunting around for the architectural answer to this, so posting amongst experts for some clarity.

My production is in a remote DC, where all primary backups are to a DD2200 using DDBoost. In addition to these, there are Backup Copy jobs running to copy backups from the DD2200 to a second local 10GB iSCSI array. A direct attach tape library is also attached to the primary backup server for GFS.

The Ops overhead of having someone go to the DC to change tapes is significant, so I want to add in replication to the backups so the backups are also copied to our DR site (actually our HQ building). My plan is to also move the physical tape autoloader over to the DR site and connect it to a new physical tape server with additional storage for the replications to use as a replication target.

My question is would it work or is there a method / type of job to have the tape server use it's local storage (replication target) as a source to then take them to tape?

Many thanks.
Jeremy.

[PTide]

Hi,

<...>copy backups from the DD2200 to a second local 10GB iSCSI array.

It's not quite clear if the second array is located on DR, or on the production site. Please elaborate.

My question is would it work

If I got everything right then you can to copy the backups to the DR tape server's local storage first (you'll have to configure it to act as a repository), and then copy them to tape. Another option is to setup a backup to tape job and use backups located on DC and point it to the DR remote tape server.

Thanks

[Jer2224]

Hi,

Thanks for responding so quickly.

The second array is located at the Production site, next to the DD2200. At the moment, the DD does daily backups, and the second array acts as a local GFS disk-backed repository.

So which of your options would be preferred / best practice?
- In the first option would this be another Backup Copy job or would I replicate the existing primary backups to DR? Do I want multiple backup copy jobs running continuously?
- In the second option this is what I cannot fathom - how do you set the replicated copy at DR to be the target for a tape backup job? Is / would it be selectable as a backup source?

Many thanks.
Jeremy.

[PTide]

In the first option would this be another Backup Copy job or would I replicate the existing primary backups to DR? Do I want multiple backup copy jobs running continuously?

Yes, you'll have to setup another Backup Copy job which will put an additional load on your primary repo.

Is / would it be selectable as a backup source?

Backup copy jobs are selectable as a source for Backup to Tape jobs. In other words you can setup a backup-to-tape job to grab backup copy job files from production site and send them to the remote tape server at HQ.

Thanks