Introduction:
The Office of Information Technology at the University of Maryland provides
centralized data protection services for university departments and affiliates. OIT's
data protection service is hosted by IBM's Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM), an
enterprise backup and archive software suite that provides data protection for standard
files and applications on many leading operating platforms, including Linux,
Solaris, Windows, Netware and OS X. When backing up using OIT's central
service, protected data is backed up directly to disk incrementally every night.
An additional copy of the data is then copied to an alternate location away from
the main backup server in OIT's primary data center. In this manner, data
protected by TSM is located in two different physical locations and each copy is
available for any restore need.
Our institutional data is one of our most critical resources and it grows
dramatically each year. We are pleased to offer this service to university
departments and affiliates at a very reasonable price.
Registration for the backup service is restricted to University of Maryland
departmental and affiliate servers and faculty/staff workstations. Student
workstations and non-University machines will not be eligible for backup
service. We will continually expand our data protection services to meet the growing needs of the
University. We will also review our cost model annually and adjust it
accordingly to account for technological capacity improvements and to take
advantage of the economies of scale we hope to realize with expansion. For
more information on backup retention plans and current billing rates, please see
our service information page.
This site is a starting point for consolidating documentation
for the TSM-based OIT data protection service. Please refer to this site for updates concerning
the OIT backup service at
the U. of Maryland. For more information on the technical and administrative
aspects of OIT's backup service you can e-mail the Enterprise Storage and Backup
group
at backups-help@umd.edu.
News:
09/14/2009
Beginning September 17th, 2009, long-term, primary
backup data for users of the TSM Backup Service will be migrated to our
Secondary Data Center (SDC) from the Primary Data Center (PDC). Please be
advised of the following disaster-recovery consequences of this architectural
change:
1. Recovery time of the TSM server in case of a
disaster at the PDC will be improved by several hours thereby reducing recovery
time of production OIT data.
2. Recovery of production data for clients housed in
the same building as the SDC may be affected should there be an extended
building-wide outage. In this scenario, offsite tapes may need to be recalled
from our vaulting vendor before complete restores of any host can occur. This
will add approximately 6 hours to a recovery. Previously, a building outage at
the SDC did not require this delay.
The migration process is set to begin on September 17th,
2009 and conclude by January 1st, 2010 or earlier. Throughout this process we
will continue generating a second copy of backup data daily. As has been
standard procedure, this second copy will be vaulted weekly through our vaulting
contract with Iron Mountain Inc.
If you have any questions regarding this migration,
please email us at
backups-help@umd.edu and we'll be glad to provide you with further details.
Thank you for your continued patronage,
Enterprise Storage and Backup
06/01/2009
To all TSM Data Protection Service users:
On Thursday, June 11, 2009 from 1:00pm to 5:00pm, TSM-hosted backup/restore and
archiving services will be unavailable due to scheduled maintenance. There will
be no user action required, but please keep in mind that the TSM server will be
unavailable to handle any backup/restore or archiving requests during the
maintenance window. When attempting any of these actions, the TSM client will
issue a error message indicating that the server is unreachable. Please attempt
your tasks after 5:00pm when the server returns to service.
Thank you for your patience during this period. Service shall be brought back
online no later than 5pm. As such, nightly scheduled backups are expected to
occur following this maintenance window as normal.
If you have any questions or concerns, please email us at
backups-help@umd.edu.
Part of this maintenance will be to upgrade the TSM server to server code
version 5.5.x. This server code version is a major version change, but in
actuality, is a relatively minor change in terms of added server functionality.
For information on the technical changes and enhancements from the version 5.4.x
server code, please visit this page:
Technical Changes for Version 5 Release 5
In terms of functionality, the best enhancements for version 5.5.x of server
or client code can be found on the client-side binaries. It is strongly
recommended to upgrade to client code 5.5.x as soon as possible to take
advantage of enhanced client functionality and bug fixes. Below is a list of web
pages documenting the differences in the 5.5.x client code per platform:
Technical Changes for Version 5.5 for Windows Clients
Technical Changes for Version 5.5 for Unix/Linux Clients
Technical Changes for Version 5.5 for Macintosh Clients
OIT maintains a site for all OIT-supported TSM Backup/Archive client binaries.
Obtain the 5.5.x binaries here. 01/09/2009
To all TSM Data Protection Service users:
On Thursday, January 15, 2009 from 1:00pm to 5:00pm, TSM-hosted backup/restore
and archiving services will be unavailable due to scheduled maintenance. There
will be no user action required, but please keep in mind that the TSM server
will be unavailable to handle any backup/restore or archiving requests during
the maintenance window. When attempting any of these actions, the TSM client
will issue a error message indicating that the server is unreachable. Please
attempt your tasks after 5:00pm when the server returns to service.
Thank you for your patience during this period. Service shall be brought back
online no later than 5pm. As such, nightly scheduled backups are expected to
occur following this maintenance window as normal.
If you have any questions or concerns, please email us at
backups-help@umd.edu.
OIT Storage and Backup Team
News Archive
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