Successful System Recovery using Ignite-UX

ManualsBrandsHP ManualsSoftwareHP Ignite-UX

Table of Contents

Abstract............................................................................................................................... 2

Executive summary ...............................................................................................................2

Recovery archive creation considerations ................................................................................2

Documentation.................................................................................................................. 3

Rapidity of change ............................................................................................................3

Creation frequency............................................................................................................4

Retention..........................................................................................................................5

Example .......................................................................................................................5

Budgetary and other constraints ..........................................................................................6

Disk-space cost ..............................................................................................................6

Tape cost ...................................................................................................................... 7

Network .......................................................................................................................8

Processing speed ...........................................................................................................9

Input/output (I/O) usage ................................................................................................9

Creation time ................................................................................................................9

Service level agreements....................................................................................................9

Testing recovery archives ................................................................................................. 10

Archive recovery essentials..................................................................................................10

Files that must not be restored from backup tapes................................................................ 10

Recovering your applications............................................................................................10

Operating system files to be recovered ..............................................................................11

Summary ...........................................................................................................................11

For more information ..........................................................................................................12

Summary of content (12 pages)

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Successful System Recovery using Ignite-UX Table of Contents Abstract............................................................................................................................... 2 Executive summary ............................................................................................................... 2 Recovery archive creation considerations ................................................................................ 2 Documentation...........................................
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Abstract Ignite-UX for HP-UX addresses the need for system administrators to perform operating system installations, deployment, and recovery, often on a large scale. It provides the means for creating and reusing standard operating system configurations. Additionally, Ignite-UX delivers the ability to archive operating system configurations and to use these archives to replicate systems, with the added benefit of speeding up the process.
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Application backups allow you to recover application file systems and data. Typically, they are scheduled at times when the application is down or quiescent, or in a state where a valid backup can be executed effectively.
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The three categories of broadly different systems are as follows: • Sunrise — those systems that are just starting out the use life-cycle and are undergoing rapid change. These systems probably require the most frequent recovery archives creation: every few days to at most a few weeks. Systems in this category are usually pre-production or test, or have just entered production and are being closely monitored.
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Retention Typically, you should retain recovery archives using similar retention periods as those used for your application backups. This is because there may be a time delay between finding a problem and needing to recover a system to a known state. Retention periods are best explained with the following example. Example – – – – Weekly recovery archives may have a retention period of 4 weeks. Every 4th recovery archive (monthly) may have a retention period of 6 months.
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generations of recovery archives become important if there is a problem with more recent recovery archives whose use prevents you from recovering a system. This introduces ad hoc (created before and after major system changes) recovery archives should have a retention period of 3-6 months. When choosing a retention period, you must choose one that supports your business objectives. The following issues for network recovery archives: • Typically, you may keep two recovery archives for a given system.
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archives can be recovered at another site). This means that even using make_net_recovery shares most, if not all, of the same costs as those described in the Tape cost topic. A tape retention cycle that adheres to the appropriate retention periods for a potentially large number of recovery archives on tape requires a great deal of disk space. In addition, it requires fast, high-capacity tape drives to backup the data.
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any other cost). This is significantly lower than the cost of a disk array to hold the equivalent amount of data (1500 GB) on disk. Network When deciding whether you should use network or tape recovery, you need to review your network infrastructure. For network recovery, you must have the available bandwidth on the Ignite-UX server to create recovery archives and recover systems without adversely affecting production applications.
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Processing speed You should be aware that when creating a recovery archive on lower-end and uniprocessor systems (for example: rx1600, rx2600, rp24xx, and rp3410 systems), a considerable amount of CPU time is required to perform Ignite-UX tasks. When writing a network recovery archive, the system compresses the tar or cpio archive being written to the NFS file system using gzip. There is a considerable amount of CPU time spent compressing this data.
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Typically, the SLA is more important than the cost of implementing a recovery strategy because the cost of implementing the SLA should be included in the total, agreed-upon cost (in capital and recurring costs). Testing recovery archives It is critically important that recovery archives are tested when created, although it is not necessary to test every recovery archive.
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If the recovery archive contains any application files, you should ignore these files. The data or program files belonging to the application are likely to have changed. Always recover your application programs and data using your application backup solution. You may consider excluding application programs and data from all recovery archives you create.
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For more information The following relevant documents are available online at the HP Technical Documentation Web site at http://www.docs.hp.