seeking opinion on using Veritas agent on AIX (IBM Unix) to do ontape backups

I guess the subject says it all...is it safe? I dont really want to do my AIX hosted database backups over the network, but we have this nice shiney LTO drive that lives on a Windows 2003 server that I can use (via Veritas) to do backups. Is anyone doing this? Whats the gotchas, other than the several layers of complexity and new points of failure? Also occurs to me to wonder how much support I can expect from Informix/IBM when things go wrong. Look at me talking myself out of it already! Please weigh in oh-wise-ones!

onbar is an xbsa "compliant" backup mechanism that will work with xbsa compliant storage devices. Provided that you have appropriate IBM Informix maintenance and the IBM Informix product you are using is fully supported I see no reason why IBM Informix would not help you with support of their component (onbar). IBM informix support would be unlikely to be able to provide much assistance with the Veritas side. Through the use of the Informix support team you probably get a lot of assistance in tracking down any problems onbar has quite a nice "fault finding" utility, the BARDEBUG facility, which can generate various levels of debug. This normally provides information that the storgae manager provider can work with. If you considered using Tivoli rather than Veritas as your xbsa complaint storage manager, then both omponents would be IBMs issue and the IBM and Tivoli teams would be able to work together to resolve. emebohw@netscape.net (sumGirl) wrote in message news:<a5e13cff.0409271340.1593d730@posting.google.com>... > I guess the subject says it all...is it safe? I dont really want to do > my AIX hosted database backups over the network, but we have this nice > shiney LTO drive that lives on a Windows 2003 server that I can use > (via Veritas) to do backups. Is anyone doing this? Whats the gotchas, > other than the several layers of complexity and new points of failure? > > Also occurs to me to wonder how much support I can expect from > Informix/IBM when things go wrong. Look at me talking myself out of it > already! > > Please weigh in oh-wise-ones!

sumGirl wrote: > I guess the subject says it all...is it safe? I dont really want to do > my AIX hosted database backups over the network, but we have this nice > shiney LTO drive that lives on a Windows 2003 server that I can use > (via Veritas) to do backups. Is anyone doing this? Whats the gotchas, > other than the several layers of complexity and new points of failure? You will need a Veritas Netbackup client on AIX to work with onbar - it's supported, but not certified on AIX 4.3 and AIX 5.x (only 32 bits versions). To see certified and supported storage managers download (excel file) http://www.ibm.com/software/data/informix/pubs/porting.zip It's very common to run a central storage manager on one box and IDS on another box, so the complexity is usually not a problem. Depending on the tape device(s)'s capacity (MBytes/second) network might be the bottleneck, but often it's the tape device that's slowest. > > Also occurs to me to wonder how much support I can expect from > Informix/IBM when things go wrong. Look at me talking myself out of it > already! > > Please weigh in oh-wise-ones!

sumGirl wrote: > > I guess the subject says it all...is it safe? I dont really want to do > my AIX hosted database backups over the network, but we have this nice > shiney LTO drive that lives on a Windows 2003 server that I can use > (via Veritas) to do backups. Is anyone doing this? Whats the gotchas, > other than the several layers of complexity and new points of failure? > > Also occurs to me to wonder how much support I can expect from > Informix/IBM when things go wrong. Look at me talking myself out of it > already! > > Please weigh in oh-wise-ones! what type of LAN are you on? 100 Mbit or Gigabit or trunced 2 or 4 way Gbit? How big is your database or even how big is a level 0? Then calculate, but you really should have a private network for this purpose only, because you will create a very high load on your LAN. On a Gigabit ethernet conn you can expect 80 MBytes/sec and a modern LTO tape can write about 75 MBytes/sec. But if your db is in the half TB range this is not very short time for restore/backup. After all it also is worth a test if your IDS can write 80 MBytes/sec in case of restore when doing single threaded restore. Normally one goes multithread and parallel to reach proper speed, but to do this you need more than 1 LTO tape .... dic_k -- Richard Kofler SOLID STATE EDV Dienstleistungen GmbH Vienna/Austria/Europe

sumGirl, Relax. There are several ways you can backup Informix on AIX using Veritas: 1. Ontape to disk, and then backup this disk image using NetBackup. This is a two-step method and will work OK. I compressed my ontape disk image before backing it up, and then restore from this compressed image with a named pipe. It worked OK, but the administrative work was a bit of a hassle. 2. Get Veritas's "infxbsa" XBSA library and use Informix's onbar. Onbar has a few extra bells and whistles that ontape doesn't, and the administration is easier. Most Informix DBA's do this. 3. Use onbar's extenal backup method, and a mirroring system like Flashsnap. This is quite a bit more administration and hardware, but the backups are very fast. Basically your mirroring the Informix instance, breaking the mirrors, and backing the mirror up. You should get Veritas' XBSA library to backup the logical logs separately so you can take advantage of onbar's bells and whistles. Hope this helps. I skimmed over a lot of detail, but hopefully this gives you an idea. Good luck. Brice Avila emebohw@netscape.net (sumGirl) wrote in message news:<a5e13cff.0409271340.1593d730@posting.google.com>... > I guess the subject says it all...is it safe? I dont really want to do > my AIX hosted database backups over the network, but we have this nice > shiney LTO drive that lives on a Windows 2003 server that I can use > (via Veritas) to do backups. Is anyone doing this? Whats the gotchas, > other than the several layers of complexity and new points of failure? > > Also occurs to me to wonder how much support I can expect from > Informix/IBM when things go wrong. Look at me talking myself out of it > already! > > Please weigh in oh-wise-ones!