Backing up AS400

What methods are being used to back up AS400? We have an 820 with 1,100 GB. We are using a 3590. We take a full system (go 21) once a week and incrementals nightly. The full takes anywhere from 12-15 hours. During this time *everything* must be down. What are some other alternatives? How can we reduce our backup time? We only have one AS400.

Thanks,
Tom

We use the Save while active function. Works like a champ, we are in the process of implementing High Availability, and then we will do our backups from the target machine. We have never had a problem with the SWA. Just make sure your groups make sense, ie save the DTA & CTL libraries as a group.

The save takes longer and the performance of the DB is a little degraded, but if you schedule it at the right time, you never notice it.

We know it works be cause early in our project we needed to do a restore, everything was perfect.

Hope this helps.

Tom Davidson

We know about SWA. That is what we do nightly. The thing about SWA is that you need a "starting point". Somewhere along the line you need a full backup. To get a restore, you need to lay down your full followed by each SWA. The full backup is our problem.

Tom,

SWA works without the requirement for it being incremental. For example you can do a FULL save (read SAVLIB not SAVCHGOBJ) of SYS7333, SVM7333, DD7333, OL7333, PRODDTA, and PRODCTL that you could use to do a restore of oneworld.

We do the same for Vertex, FastFax, OnDemand, Extol, & JetForms. This allows us to only need to go down to save the OS which we do ONLY when we make a significant change, ie CUM PTF's, release upgrade, and such.

This allows us to limit our down times, DUE TO BACKUPS, to about 12 hours per quarter.

We obviously have other down times due to deploys, service packs, and JDE upgrades, however our total down time is less than 20 hours per quarter.

Just how we do it.

Tom Davidson

Tom,

Here's an idea. How many 3590 tape drives do you have available at the
time you do your full system backup? If you have two 3590's use both of
them to in your full system backup.

You would have to write some CL code to do this and do the individual
components that constitutes a GO SAVE Option 21 backup. When you hit
points where you can specifiy multiple tape device names (SAVLIB
*NONSYS) you specify both device names. What will happen is both drives
will be shoveling data out to tape cartridges.

If you have some $$$ to work with, consider implementing BRMS to manage
your media and do your backups. I have been using BRMS for 6 months now
and love it! It was easy to implement and you can use multiple tape
drives in BIG backup jobs.

I am in the process of upgrading our Model 830 to a Model 870 next
month. I have a 3584 tape library coming with it as well and will have
three of the new ULTRIUM2 tape drives in the library. Two will be
dedicated to the 870 and one will be going to our development iSeries.
BRMS makes this so easy to do from a tape library perspective as well as
supporting multiple devices in doing a full system backup.

Regards,

Mike Shaw




iSeries Model 830
iSeries Model 270 (Development)

Hi Tom,
We use BRMS as others have mentioned and we run to 2 tape drives concurrently with around 550Gb of data. That takes us 2.5 hours and we shut everything down before running the backup. I guess the question is do you want faster backups or do you need more uptime (not necessarily the same thing....).
More uptime - You can run a save while active (at cost zero) and leave all of your systems up. This will take longer and isn't recommended during the middle of a busy period as each file backed up must have a breakpoint before being saved. It will depend upon the nature of your data - if you have a fewer number of very large files users may notice a significant performance degradation.
Faster Backups - Only way around this is to spend money I'm afraid. An extra tape drive (maybe 2) would make a huge difference to your performance. Your backups do seem a bit slow, I wonder if you're using the fastest SCSI card available (I think #2749) and what are your pool sizes are when you do your backups (do you have enough memory..?). You could always monitor your backups either using performance tools or physically looking at them to determine any bottlenecks in the system(processor/disk/memory...?). I think option 21 does a SAVSYS as well so unless you're putting PTF's on every week that is not necessary. If you're feeling adventurous you could always buy more DASD, replicate data to another partition (using mimix/data mirror) and then back that up during the online day. This is something we're looking at currently.
Shutting the system down on a regular basis isn't all bad though, iSeries boxes should be regularly IPL'd and I think OneWorld benefits from being bounced to avoid kernel errors.
Good Luck,
Richard

Re: RE: Backing up AS400

Mike,

We are in the final stages of implimenting High Availability (HA). The user test is this weekend. We will then begin doing all our *NONSYS backups off the secondary machine.

We use a tape library and have 4 3590's, however it is shared among about 12 LPARS (5 physical machines). When we have HA running we will simply do our SAVSYS while we run on the secondary machine.

Robot SAVE, our backup utility, also supports multiple devices on the SAV* commands.

I do agree with your proposal to do 3rd party backup management, no matter what it costs, it is less expensive (and more complete) than doing it yourself.

If you are interested in our HA implementation, JDE & I are doing a presentation on it at FOCUS.

Tom Davidson