Monday, February 27, 2006

NIM vs. SysBack for DRP

We recently performed a DR test and one business group decided to use a NIM server to rebuild their systems for the test. This meant taking the local NIM server and having to restore it then restore the individual clients, meanwhile us TSM admins sat around twiddling our thumbs waiting for them to finish (for some reason the system images and NIM are handle by the System Administrators group and not the Backup/Recovery group). I would have preferred SysBacks (since we are an AIX shop), but the SA had this brilliant idea to use NIM. This added another layer of complexity and actually due to disk issues it took forever to get the NIM server running. I would like feedback on what others have done for their DR tests, and if anyone has experience with the TSM integrated  SysBack feature I would love to hear how it works for you.

2 comments:

  1. Chad,
    I did the full DR test on test system with sysback. Using p520, SAN attach 3584 tapelibrary. Work grate, we restore not only rootvg, we restore, datavg, and db2vg, and db2logvg. Starting system in sysback with bootp was pain neck. Other then that it was nice. I'll take sysback over nim any day.

    -Atif

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  2. It all depends on how many AIX clients you have to restore - if a large number, then only NIM makes sense ('cause it require a certain amt of network setup and then you get the other AIX clients NIM restore from the NIM server for OS, and then TSM for datavg), otherwise stick with mksysb of mkdvd for AIX client OS recoveries.
    AC 2006

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