I find myself agreeing with Diego!
In this discussion I read about backing up to various things be that NFS and FTP and 'IP Services'. I also note that some of the backups are parked on Windows. And I get the heebie jeebies!! Why?
Backups aren't just done to check off the box: "Do you have a backup?" Backups are done for one reason only: To be able to recover. WHAT you recover varies dramatically from a few rows accidentally deleted a day ago, to data from a month or year ago, to all IFS data due to a ransomware attack, to the entire system due to fire, flood, tornado, hurricane, etc.
Most have never needed to recover an entire system, and that's a good thing, but you absolutely must know how and must practice. It's a bad time to learn that you have no bootable device on your server when all your data needs to be restored. It's a bad time to learn that your backups have themselves been compromised because they were also flooded, burned, blown away, or they were encrypted by ransomware since they sat on an NFS share or an FTP server or on a Windows server.
Additionally the extra steps required to build out a server, FTP back a ton of save files or catalog entries, then recover the system both add complications as well as time! Time that is likely excruciatingly critical just then.
Yes tape itself is un-sexy for sure. But it's easily stored 'far far away' and cannot be ransomware encrypted, and cheaply stores for a very long time. And it CAN be encrypted by you for secure storage.
Before you say: "Oh Larry, Tape is so 20th Century" let me head that of with: "Yep you are correct!" thus, we don't use it as primary backup in any new design. We focus on the the key questions required in case of disaster.
1) Can I IPL from this backup device and re-install the system?
2) Can I use IBM i Native save and restore commands to read and write to this device?
3) Is the location where my backups live susceptible to vulnerabilities such as, encryption, theft, alteration, etc?
4) Can my backups automatically end up 'far far away' upon completion of the backup with no human intervention?
5) Is the device holding my backups well supported, easily maintained, expandable and will it properly notify me if a drive or other component fails?
6) Is the device efficient with its storage and power use? Remember tapes stored on a shelf use zero power every month in a row, forever. A massive NAS or server spinning hundreds of drives holding backups going back 5 or 10 years consumes a lot of electricity and makes a lot of heat. Often this is for data that is never read even once after being written. Piling on more drives due to inefficient compression just makes this problem worse.
7) In an emergency where I need to recover, how many things will I need to get working correctly before I can being rebuilding my i? With tape it's 1: The tape drive. Simple, load it and make with the restore! Compare that to some of the setups being discussed where it may take longer to get all that running and available than it takes to recover the i! In a disaster time is critical, the backup solution CANNOT add time frustration or vulnerabilities to the recovery process!
In our cloud at iInTheCloud all of our IBM i backups go to fiber attached VTLs with off site replication capability. They use native IBM i save and restore commands and happily function with BRMS or native commands. Physical tape is available for import and export as the customer requests or requires.
My point here is your backup is only as good as the ability to recover from it.
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Larry Bolhuis
IBM Champion for Power Systems
Chief i-entist
Frankeni Technology Consulting, LLC
Middleville MI
6162604746
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Original Message:
Sent: Tue September 21, 2021 05:13 PM
From: Diego KESSELMAN BARRIONUEVO
Subject: IBM i virtual tape devices and deduplication- new member introduction
Brad,
I know your VTL/ViTL use FC, but on most "cloud" providers you can't use FC services, just IP.
IBM Cloud Power Virtual Servers, for instance, can use iSCSI with DSI VTL because is IP based.
Skytap, for instance, use Commvault and software based backups and BRMS+ICC.
There are customers asking to save their data to big NAS devices using FTP or NFS.
I think, the new challenge for backups are IP based backups.
IBM i NFS server and client on Service Tools Server are really slow, but the protocol is fast.
I've heard of someone using SSHFS from a Linux machine to transfer the Image Catalog virtual cartridges to Azure BLOB (there's no native client on IBM i) to avoid copying to the Linux server with some success.
I've seen BRMS now supports parallel saves to Virtual Tape Image Catalogs because of this. Not sure about ICC and parallel FTP/Object Storage transfers, but I think this change is on the way.
But restores with these solutions still remain complex with a lot of steps and requirements.
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Diego KESSELMAN BARRIONUEVO
General Manager
ESSELWARE Soluciones, SA de CV
CDMX DIF
Original Message:
Sent: Tue September 21, 2021 04:42 PM
From: Brad Jensen
Subject: IBM i virtual tape devices and deduplication- new member introduction
Diego:
We host the virtual tape library on a windows server or windows vm. The data comes from the IBM i through FC bewcause that is how IBM likes to send it. It is very fast, and easy to add more 'tape drives' or tape libraries to the IBM i host.
While we are streaming the tape files form the IBM i, we are choppping up the data to unique deduplication chunks. After 12 or more backups, you usually have a 20 to 1 deduplication ratio. At this point you can write it to an external drive and send it to the cloud provider to load up your backups all at once.
Then for future backups, the deduplication continues, but you only send 1/20 of a normal backup for each backup, over the internet. That is the equivalent of sending data at 20 times the normal internet speed.
So 1 GB of raw backup can be sent as dedupe chunks at 50 MB per second to the cloud. At that rate, you can do 2 to 3 TB of raw backup per hour.
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Brad Jensen
Original Message:
Sent: Tue September 21, 2021 07:18 AM
From: Diego KESSELMAN BARRIONUEVO
Subject: IBM i virtual tape devices and deduplication- new member introduction
Brad,
What happen when we have a cloud environment and no FC available?
I've made some tests with NFS but is really slow, saving to disk and then to Cloud Object Storage isn't fast enough for large amount of data, and iSCSI support is limited.
Maybe an improved NFS service or some kind of deduplication mechanism when transfering to Object Storage could help.
What do you think?
Regards
Diego Kesselman
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Diego KESSELMAN BARRIONUEVO
General Manager
ESSELWARE Soluciones, SA de CV
CDMX DIF
Original Message:
Sent: Thu September 16, 2021 04:55 PM
From: Brad Jensen
Subject: IBM i virtual tape devices and deduplication- new member introduction
My name is Brad Jensen, I live in Tulsa OK. I have a wife and adult children and some grandchildren. I've been in the AS/400 and IBM i market since 1989. We have thousands of IBM i customers all over the world.
We make and sell an IBM virtual tape device that connects two the IBM i system iOS, as well as AIX and Linux and Windows. It runs as a server appliance with FC connection, and can run in a Windows VM.
Our site is www.laservault.com and the product is ViTL.
This message is meant as an introduction, and I won't be spamming this forum. If the forum allows commercial paid messages, I will use those.
I'm here to discuss IBM i backup, remote backup, offsite IBM i backup replication, and deduplication. I designed our deduplication system with our head technical genius, so I can discuss deduplication in general, the boost this gives to replication speeds for backups, and the advantages and disadvantages of it.
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Brad Jensen
Owner and CEO
Electronic Storage Corporation
www.laservault.com
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