Scenarios: How one company uses BRMS

JKL Toy Company, a fictitious business, uses Backup, Recovery and Media Services (BRMS) to perform backup and recovery operations on three of their servers. You can use these examples to create your own backup policies and media management strategy with BRMS.

Sharon Jones, the system administrator for the JKL Toy Company, is responsible for ensuring that all of their data is backed up and that they can recover their systems in the event of a disaster or system failure. Following is a diagram of JKL's network:

JKL has four iSeries™ servers that each serve a different purpose and have different backup, recovery, and availability needs. These servers are as follows:

• JKLDEV - this server is for development and is used primarily during the week and during the day, although there is some development activity into the evening hours and on weekends.
• JKLPROD - this is the server that JKL uses for all of their customer orders and where their business applications are installed (inventory control, customer orders, contracts and pricing, accounts receivable).
• JKLINT and JKLINT2 - these servers are used for the JKL website and e-mail.

Sharon spent considerable time initially planning the backup strategy that would best meet JKL's needs-- in doing so, she had to address the following questions:

• What will it cost JKL if a system goes down?
• What are the availability requirements for each system?
• What is the backup window for each system?
• What data has to be backed up and how often does it have to be backed up?

• Scenario: Global policy properties
  There are some global properties that Sharon wants to specify that will control how BRMS operates in her environment.
• Scenario: Backup using BRMS
  Sharon's backup plan for JKL took into account each server's purpose, workload, and availability requirements.
• Scenario: Archive data
  Sharon Jones, the system administrator at the JKL Toy Company, wants to archive older data currently stored on one of the systems to media. You can use this example to plan and configure archive policies using BRMS.
• Scenario: Move media
  Sharon knows that media management is critical to the success of her backup strategy. If her media is damaged or destroyed, her backups are destroyed with it. If the correct media cannot be located when it is needed, her recoveries can be unnecessarily delayed. Sharon knows that it is important to have multiple copies of her media, and to have at least one copy stored offsite. Sharon creates a move policy in BRMS that she uses to track her media.
• Scenario: Reclaim media
  Periodically, Sharon retrieves a special set of tapes from the vault. These tapes contain some of their business records that need to be kept for several years. She decides to run reclaim to copy only the active data to new tape volumes. This will save the latest data that hasn't expired on the tape volumes to the new volumes and they will be sent back to the vault.
• Scenarios: Perform recovery operations
  One of the reasons that the JKL Toy Company chose BRMS as their backup and recovery solution is because of how easy it makes full system recoveries.