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Backup Services at the University of Maryland

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:

07/25/2008

To all TSM Data Backup and Restore Service Users and Administrators,

Starting at approximately 2:00pm on Thursday August 7, 2008 there will be a TSM backup and restore server outage.  The service outage is necessary in order to update critical storage driver software for EMC Clariion and Symmetrix arrays. The former houses current disk storage pools for our TSM-based services. Service is expected to resume within two hours (approx. 4:00pm on the 7th).

Backups scheduled during business hours may be minimally impacted.  The server will also not be available for restores during that time.  Nightly server backups are expected to proceed as normal on the night of 08/07/2008.  If you have any questions please contact the OIT Help Desk at 301-405-1500 or send email to backups-help@umd.edu.

Thank you for your continued patience.

OIT Enterprise Storage and Backups Group

 

04/02/2008

To all OIT TSM-based backup service customers:

On Monday, April 7th 2008, the OIT Storage and Backup group will change the way we track and store requests for service. On that date, we'll
begin using Request, a system designed specifically to handle service tickets. The Request system has been in use within OIT for many years,
and it will help us track issues through to resolution, a feature that  our email reflector, backups-help@umd.edu, cannot do.

What does this change mean to you? Email sent to backups-help@umd.edu will automatically open a new service ticket within Request. Your ticket
will be assigned to a member of our group, and responses will take the form of email, just as they do now. To update a ticket, simply reply to
the email generated by the Request system. Request will automatically keep track of all updates--yours and ours--until the ticket is closed.
When responding, there is no longer any need to include the text of earlier messages in your email. The Request system stores the entire
message thread in its ticket database, and it will continue to supply this text in all messages for the life of the ticket. Closed tickets can
be reopened simply by replying to the ticket (once again, without including old text).

In summary, please continue to use backups-help@umd.edu to send technical and administrative questions regarding OIT's backup services.
We believe that the ability of the Request system to perform ticket management and tracking will result in better service overall.  Please
use this same address to share any questions or concerns.


Thank you,

Enterprise Storage and Backup Group
Office of Information Technology
University of Maryland

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