Hey ho. Here's the skinny. We will, eventually, have a number of clients backing up to a TSM server on a regular basis (we're still setting up the SAN and other ancillary things that are needed to support the TSM server). Some of them will be filesystem backups; others will be database backups (which, if I understand correctly, are most likely to be seen as archives rather than backups as such). The setup involves two sites, A and B, which have multiple gigabit fibre connections between them (so they're effectively on the same LAN; the only real difference is a very small amount of additional latency.) Systems at site A will backup to a server at site B, and vice versa.
The project I'm working on involves a third site; call it site C. The connectivity from sites A and B to site C is significantly poorer than that between A and B, largely because site C is significantly remote to A and B (whilst A and B are within a few km of each other), precluding running of fibre to it. (Not sure what the current connections are; that's not my area.) The idea is that if things go boom in a major way, and we lose everything at _both_ site A and site B, we want to have copies of the university's critical data (student records, SAP, that sort of thing) available for restore. Maybe the data will be a little old, but better than nothing.
So the idea is this. The servers holding the critical data backup to their backup server as normal. Once every so often (once a week, once a fortnight, once a month...), we want to take the data off the _backup server_, and copy it to another TSM server at site C. We want to do this only for those critical servers, not for all servers. The data may be in the form of either archives or filesystem backups, or some combination of the two. We _don't_ want to be running extra backups for the servers in question to provide this redundancy.
The two solutions I've come up with involve data export, and copy pools (via virtual volumes). The problem is, both of those operate at the storage pool level; there's no way to specify "copy/export only the data for _this_ client, and no others" that I can see. It's preferable that we not have to create separate storage pools (all the way down to the tape level) for these systems just so we can do this -- we'd prefer to have one disk pool and one tape pool for the whole shebang if possible. Backup sets may be doable, but I'm a little uncertain about how they'd go with virtual volumes, and also whether they'd cover archive data sets.
So the question is: is there any way we can say to TSM "Copy this client's data (backup and archive) to that server over there, ignoring all other client data in that storage pool"? Or am I smoking crack (again)?
Any pointers or suggestions on where to look would be very gratefully received. For me, this isn't so much a learning curve as a learning cliff. :) If it's relevant, the clients in question are mostly Solaris, and we'll be running Tivoli Storage Manager 5.2 on Solaris servers.
Many, many thanks for any tips. I'm coming from a background with Legato Networker, and I'm still trying to get my head around some of the more interesting aspects of TSM, learning as I go. :)
Cheers,
Stuart.