Backup Services

01/24/2008

The response for Tivoli training has been replied to in such a positive manner, we have scheduled two sessions. Following are the date-time-location.

Friday February 6th, 2008
Location CSS 4400

1st session will go from 10 am until noon
2nd session will go from 2 pm until 4 pm

You don't need to sign up ahead of time, just go to the session that best suits your schedule. If you have any questions, send a note to backups-help@umd.edu

Thank you very much for the positive response.

The scheduled TSM upgrade is now complete. The TSM server has been upgraded to version 5.4.2.0 and was operational beginning at 2:30pm.

To all TSM Client Users and Administrators:

On Tuesday, January 8th, 2008 data backup and restore services provided by OIT through Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) will be unavailable for approximately three hours beginning at 1:00pm. Services are expected to resume again no later than 4:00pm.

This will be a scheduled maintenance outage to upgrade the production TSM server binaries. The TSM server will be upgraded from TSM version 5.3.4.0 to version 5.4.2.0. No client impact is expected with this upgrade since, in general, earlier client versions are compatible with more recent server binaries. However, during the maintenance window described above, backup and restore services will fail until services are resumed.

If you have questions or concerns regarding the impact of this upgrade or the timing of the outage, please email us at backups-help@umd.edu. For further news and updates, please visit www.backups.umd.edu.

Thank you,

Office of Information Technology
Enterprise Storage and Backups

To all OIT data protection users and TSM client administrators,

On Friday, December 28th, 2007 backup and restore service provided by OIT through Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) will be unavailable for approximately four hours beginning at 12:00pm.

This will be a scheduled maintenance outage to upgrade the underlying AIX operating system for the TSM server. AIX will be upgraded to the most recent technology level for AIX 5.3. Among other things, this upgrade will apply security-related fixes to the current installed release of AIX 5.2 TL 9.

Backup and restores will be unavailable between 12:00pm and 4:00pm on 12/28/2007. Full service will be restored no later than 5:00pm. Nightly backups are expected to proceed as scheduled. Please notify us at backups-help@umd.edu if there are concerns regarding the upgrade or time frame of the service outage.

Thank you,

Office of Information Technology
Enterprise Storage and Backups

The frame was succesfully added to the tape robot. Normal operations resumed at 12:30 PM..

A planned outage of one of OIT's tape robots will take place on Monday December 10, 2007, from 10:00 AM to 12:30 PM. IBM will be adding one more frame to the library, in order to increase its capacity with more cartridge cells, more tape drives, and more logical libraries. This will allow us to accommodate increasing storage needs.

The outage is expected to have a minor impact, since the logical libraries running on the robot are not in use at that time. Please direct questions, comments or concerns to backups-help@umd.edu. We will reconsider the scheduling of the maintenance outage should there be any outstanding issues with the current time frame.

The hardware upgrade of OIT's production TSM server completed successfully. Normal operations resumed at 2:00 PM.

There will be a planned maintenance outage of OIT's production TSM server, tivoli.umd.edu, for about 6 hours starting on November 17th at 9:00am. Backup and restore services are expected to commence at approximately 3:00pm. All backup and restore operations attempted during this time frame will fail. We advise to re-try any restores or backups after 3:00pm and contacting backups-help@umd.edu if any noticeable errors occur after this time.

The maintenance outage will enable us to upgrade the existing server hardware for the TSM server. CPU and memory resources will be augmented and will position us to improve backup and restore services for our clients.

We thank you for your patience during this maintenance service outage. Please direct questions, comments or concerns to backups-help@umd.edu. We will reconsider the scheduling of the maintenance outage should there be any outstanding issues with the current time frame.

The Office of Information Technology is pleased to announce an updated billing algorithm that provides for more affordable backup and archive protection for your data.

The new billing structure follows previous monthly billing cycles, but allows us to reduce the cost from $1.10/GB/month to $0.38/GB/month for all data we retain on backup tapes. All monthly licensing costs remain the same. Reduced costs are retroactive to October 1, 2007 and include all data, including AFS filesystems.

In addition, we'd like to announce the availability of archive services using the same framework as our current backup system. Archives are kept offline in the OIT tape room or can be sent to Iron Mountain for an additional cost. We are able to use the same licenses from our backup service to further reduce the archive cost when used in conjunction with the backup service. The rate is $0.11/GB of data sent to us for archiving. The data is stored on a dedicated WORM tape which will be billed back to the user at cost. Unlike our backup service, these tapes are not kept online and thus there is no recurring monthly charge for the space.

Product support for Legato will be dropped January 1 , 2008. All current users will have until then to migrate to Tivoli. Data that is backed up to Legato will remain active for 90 days after January 1, 2008 and then the system will be shut down permanently.

To all TSM Client Administrators,

The Enterprise Storage and Backup group is announcing the addition of online disk backup capacity for our clients currently using the TSM-based backup service provided by the Office of Information Technology. As an immediate result of the added capacity, we are targeting to store a weeks worth of backup data on disk. Currently, we are storing four days worth of data on disk after which point the data is moved to LTO tapes. We anticipate that the new disk backup pool hierarchy will position us to grow and extend our services in the future at minimal costs to OIT and its clients.

To add disk capacity, there will be a window of about four days in which backup data will only be available for restoration from tape. Starting on Thursday, October 4th and up to Monday, October 8th, 2007, all restores from the TSM server, tivoli.umd.edu, will originate from tape and may result in longer restore periods. No other aspect of the service should be impacted. Nightly backups will still be staged to disk during this time period, but will be immediately flushed to tape. The four day maintenance period will culminate with a short service outage on October 4th, 2007 at approximately 3:30pm until no later than 4:30pm.

As an additional consequence of the added capacity, we will also begin minimizing the number of tapes on which chargeback customer backup data resides on a per-node basis. The results of which will lead to improved restore times from tape media for our chargeback customers.

Thank you for your patience during this storage pool maintenance window. If you have any questions or concerns, please email us at backups-help@umd.edu and we will be glad to address your questions.

Sincerely,

Sergio Fuentes
Enterprise Storage and Backups
Office of Information Technology
University of Maryland

Maintenance Window Summary
----------------------------
Purpose:
To add disk storage pool capacity on TSM server

Dates:
10/4/2007 - 10/08/2007

Times:

Business hours in the maintenance window including the weekend.

Impact:
- Restores direct from tape may result in slower restore times
- Scheduled server reboot will result in service outage for 30 minutes on 10/08/2007 at approx. 3:30pm
- No client intervention required

On Friday, March 30th, 2007 we will be updating our backup data retention levels for the MIN and LOW retention levels. The proposed change will impose a 180 day limit on the number of days the oldest file versions are retained in the MIN and LOW profiles. The MIN and LOW retention levels will still limit client backups to 2 and 7 versions per file. Currently, there are no limits on the number of days old versions are retained.

This retention level change directly affects only those clients with files assigned to the MIN and LOW retention levels. Users with backup data assigned to the MIN policy will see the oldest of the two most recent backups of a file expire after 180 days. Likewise, users with backup data assigned to the LOW policy will see the oldest of the seven most recent backups of a file expire after 180 days. Note, that this change only affects the oldest of the backup files on the TSM server. The most recent backup of a file will not be affected by this change.

The Data Retention Form in the link below has the breakout of the new retention levels, effective March 30th 2007.

We encourage our users to review their assigned backup retention policies. Policies are selected upon registration and may be modified with include/exclude options on the client or by emailing backups-help@umd.edu for assistance.

Thank you to all who have attended our client training sessions in the past. Our last training session was yesterday, 6/26/2006, and attended very well. We will be scheduling more training sessions in the future as more users sign up with our service.

As promised, we have made our training packet available online from this website. Follow this link to download a soft copy of the document. This should make it easier for you to explore the links included in the handout.

Remember to verify the integrity of your backups periodically by doing sample restores. If you have any questions about our service, technical or otherwise, please email us at backups-help@umd.edu . General comments are also appreciated.

3/30/06
I regret to inform you that I am postponing Mondays TSM training for a couple extra weeks. To date, only 4 people have show an interest and we like to have at least 10. If this creates a great problem for you, let me know.

Sorry, but consider this a rain check. I will make the offering again in another 2 weeks or so.

3/27/06
As of right today, we only have 4 people signed up for the TSM training scheduled for next Monday afternoon, April 3rd.

Unless this increases to at least 10 people, we are going to postpone it until more people have an interest. If I dont see an increase by Thursday of this week, I will announce a postponement until more interest has been generated.

The Enterprise Storage Services group that manages the TSM server for departmental backups will be performing a server upgrade on February 27th, 2006 at approximately 1:00pm. This is strictly a server only upgrade, and will not require any client-side updates or modifications.

There will be a short downtime of the TSM server application starting around 1:00pm for a duration of approximately 1 hour. In that window, the TSM server application will be upgraded from version 5.2.6.2 to 5.2.7.1. Clients will not be able to connect to the TSM server to perform restores or backups. Should you get an error when connecting in that time-frame, we advise you to re-try the operation in about 1 hour.

The new 5.2.7.1 version addresses many known issues in the TSM server application. If you have any questions regarding the impact of this new server version, please contact us at backups-help@umd.edu.

Again, no intervention on the client-side is required. Running client schedule daemons will not be impacted, and backups are expected to operate normally later that evening.

We are going to hold our second Tivoli Storage Manager training session. The session is scheduled for Wednesday, February 1st in CSS 4400 beginning at 1:30 and ending at 3:30.

Please let me know if you are planning to attend. I think we can fit approximately 25 people comfortably in that room, perhaps a couple extra. If you have any questions or concerns, or want specific issues addressed during this training session, send email to backups-help@umd.edu

Generally, we will run through the paperwork process, installation, configuration, include-exclude files, a simple backup and restore. This training is very important as you, the client, are responsible for restoring your own files and you should know the process and how to determine which version you want to recover.

Thanks and hope to see you there! t.

Anthony Derry, Manager
University of Maryland, OIT
Enterprise Storage Services

First, we have created a new moderated listserv for communications between our users and service administrators. This Listserv list exists to supply timely information with regards to the new TSM Backup Service available to all University of Maryland Departments for their data protection purposes. Announcements regarding scheduled service interruptions, new supported client versions, the end-of-life of older client versions, changes to the TSM server, and information exchange between our users will be sent via this list as a means for communication for all our registered client contacts. As policy, when you register for our TSM service your technical and administrative contacts are automatically subscribed to this listserv. Though we advise against it, you may opt out of the listserv by unsubscribing as detailed in the list's welcome message. We encourage all users and potential users of TSM to subscribe to this list.

To subscribe to this listserv, send email to listserv@listserv.umd.edu with only the following line in the message body:

Second, there will be a client training session on 12/19/2005 from 2:00pm to 4:00pm in Building 224 (CSS) Room 4400. This is the first available training session, but more will surely be scheduled in 2006. There is room for 25 people to attend this session and seats are filling quickly. To make a RSVP, send email to backups-help@umd.edu.

10/28/2005
Today we introduce a new utility that will help estimate TSM backup monthly costs for our clients. You can access this "calculator" through the navigation menu on the left, or follow this link:

Service Cost Calculator

In addition to helping estimate costs for TSM, it will help provide a cost comparison of our TSM service with our previous backup service provided by Legato Networker.

9/26/2005
We are adding a 4th policy to our set of available backup policies. Now there will be a new policy known as "MINIMUM", or "MIN" for short. This is the minimal retention policy that we will support. The new policy has the following parameters:

There is plenty of new information on this website, and on the corresponding helpdesk documentation pages. Please see the service information page for more information on the new minimum policy.

Backup Services at the University of Maryland

Backup Announcement Archive