IBM i backup with CommVault

[RobertHoehle]

Our company wants us to get off of tape back up and we are looking towards CommVault as a solution. Does anyone have any experience with CommVault? I can see that they are in the IBM i market and pushing towards being a viable option, but I'm not sure on it. Currently we do BRMS to tape and can restore from there. One issue we have is our current DR data center wants the physical tape, so the backup would need to be put to tape after storing in CommVault (to further complicate things). This is being pushed by the Windows Network Admin and he currently uses Veeam for the Windows side of the world and seems to want to do the same with the IBM i, but I'm the IBM i side of things (Developer and Sys Admin, my main role is Developer) and I'm not sure this is the best solution. Any suggestions?

Thanks

[EmmanuelW1]

Not familiar with CommVault, but wondering how the process of getting the data to tape would work, and how long that would take. If the DR center can't hook up to CommVault for the restore, sounds like it's not a viable option.

Cheers,

Emmanuel

(Fellow Developer/Sys Admin)

[RobertHoehle]

I agree Emmanuel. If the data center can't pull the information from CommVault directly and restore, that seems a bit of a red flag right there, but I'm willing to hear them out and hoping someone has some experience with them.

[gwilburn]

Just saw your post.. we just (last week) implemented something from our IBM Busines Partner called eVault. It backs up everything but the load source. Has a green screen menu to manage it (including restores).

Greg

[Viking]

We also use BRMS and were previously backing up to tape. We looked at eVault as well and IBM was partnered with Seagate on it for this proposed solution. We also considered Exagrid and LaserVault. We ended up going with EMC Data Domain devices and their backup software. Our IBM i is backed up to Data Domain via BRMS and very little needed to change with how our backups were set up. Additionally, we back up our SAN (which has our data from VMWare Windows servers, etc.) onto the Data Domain device. We have two Data Domain devices and they can replicate one to the other, and the one can be in a different physical location. We do not use tape anymore and couldn't be happier. But I believe the Data Domains could further be backed up to tape if necessary... I'd have to check on that, it was a while ago that we implemented this solution. I know they can be backed up to the cloud.

[RobertHoehle]

Thanks Gwilburn and Viking, that's what I am thinking. Since I posted we did a backup validation to access hosting the i virtually and the backup possibilities. Hosting is still a bit pricey, but eVault or EMC is built in with the vendor/data-center and I am pretty sold on going that direction. As soon as I get access to the virtual system and see the restore results I'll make the decision, but it's looking like Data Domain - BRMS. CommVault is just not a viable solution for me at this time. I'll post what we go with. Thanks for the input! Now back to my mountains of code....

Rob

[gwilburn]

As a follow-up:

We've been using eVault for about a month now. Seems to be working pretty good. We get some errors on some objects that are in use during the USRLIB part of the backup (we are not putting the system in a restricted state like we do during a tape backup).

I accidentally hosed a source member this morning. So I did my first restore today. I was able to easily restore the source file QRPGLESRC into a temporary library. The restore option are very similar to RSTOBJ (but better). It took less than a minute.

So far, very satisfied.