Hi TSM'ers, (this ones a little long winded, sorry :) )
I have a customer who wishes to assess the maximum risk he would incurr in the following situation; We have a copygroup for backup set for 31 day point-in-time recovery. We do not have nolimit for any copygoup parameters - we assume there will only be a single backup each day. The customer has a 5 node cluster. 1 -> 4 are production machines, 5 is a failover machine. They would like to know the risk involved when, should a machine be failed over to 5, they back up the data now visible to 5 under the nodename of 5 instead of the original machines nodename, & the original machine continues to run a backup as well (this would only see local disk, as a portion of the failed over machines disk is now visible to 5, and hence mark all the non-visible files as inactive) We have told them backups would become inconsistent within filespaces that have the same names across machines, and showed them how fiddly it would be to restore a machine if they had only had one failover occurr in a 31 day period. They would like to know exactly what the risks are if they have multiple failovers within a month, and have multiple machines backing up same-named files under a single nodename!! They won't take 'It won't work' as a answer, they would like to know how it will impact the point in time restore capability for a particular machine, if they keep track of what machines failed over when. As far as I can work out with pen&paper, in a worst case, for a 3 machine cluster where 1 & 2 can failover to 3 at any time, the maximum impact would be to reduce the point-in-time restore capability for a particular machine by the number of days that machines have been failed over to 3 in the last 31 day period, because files with the same path filename on machines 1 and 2 would expire early if they change more often on one machine than they do on another. I get a headache if I try and extend this to a 5 machine cluster. do you other TSM'ers agree? and, I know from our perspective this is a 'silly' thing to work out because they should listen to the advice of the people that know & switch to backing things up correctly, but they are insisting they have this info... Any help is much appreciated! Thankyou, Matt.