CENTRALIZE YOUR BACKUPS WITH LXI - MCPRESS ONLINE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

It's Tuesday morning, and the phone rings. It's your organization's newly appointed Chief Compliance Officer, who informs you that one of your major customers has requested a Sarbanes-Oxley compliance audit. Your CCO explains that all he needs is your data retention records showing compliance with the published internal procedures. He also wants the last audit results for your data vault inventory...and he needs it by Thursday!

When faced with this situation, most data center professionals experience a slight panic and a sinking feeling in their stomach. Why? In today's world of data center management, IT professionals are faced with the increasing complexity and responsibility to efficiently back up, recover, and track all of the company's critical data. With the heterogeneous nature of most data centers, this likely involves the administration of multiple backup applications that are each platform-dependent. In short, it isn't easy!

The solution for the heterogeneous data center environment is to place a centralized backup management solution across all servers so that there is one point of control as well as centralized reporting and management. With a centralized solution, backup administrators have several valuable options available to meet their data center needs.

Centralizing Data Backup Management Through the iSeries
The enterprise data center that utilizes the power and security of the iSeries enjoys tremendous data management advantages. The largest is having complete backup and recovery capability across your entire enterprise while ensuring that data vaulting compliance is achieved.

Although it's not widely known, backup management applications exist that can make your iSeries a robust centralized backup server'a solution that is becoming widely used among enterprise data center professionals. The reason for its popularity is the flexibility it gives managers to adapt the solution to a wide variety of protection and recovery requirements on non-iSeries servers. Let's take a closer look at some of the capabilities to look for when evaluating a centralized backup application:

Intelligent backup

Centralized backup applications on the iSeries must ensure that any new library or file will be backed up automatically, eliminating the potential for communication breakdowns and data loss. Once notified of the new object by the software, the administrator can then determine if it should be scheduled for regular backup.

Prioritized backups

IT administrators require the capability to prioritize backups based upon the amount of changes being made to each library.

Customizable recovery lists

The ability to customize recovery lists is necessary in order to prepare the IT administrator for those inopportune network failures. Any IT administrator will tell you that network and data failures never occur at opportune times. If you have a data disaster two days before you have to run payroll and your recovery plan calls for payroll to be one of the last items restored, wouldn't it be great to be able to prioritize what is recovered?

Consolidation of tape libraries

The solution needs to fully support all tape libraries that are recognized by OS/400. When managing all data backup through the iSeries, you need to be able to bring the benefits of your more powerful tape library (which is typically connected to the iSeries) to the rest of the server environment. This centralized management and control'so essential to fully enabling the centralized backup process'results in decreased maintenance costs.

Disk caching

It is important to ensure that the chosen solution simply transfers the data "through" the backup server, capturing only catalog information and then sending the data to the backup device. This speeds up the process since you don't go to disk and then to tape, and it allows you to more efficiently use your iSeries disk. In other words, most client backup applications on the market copy the data from the client server to the disk on the backup server and then to the tape device, which exposes the host server's data to corruption.

Permission retention

In the event you are unable to have the original host server be your restored machine, you will want to ensure that file and directory permissions are retained upon restoration of the data.
Centralized client management'When you define centralized backup capabilities, it is important to also have centralized management of the client machines. If this is not available, you will be required to change each individual machine as your backup and recovery needs change.

Centralizing Data Vaulting

When your organization has multiple backup applications and each application has its own, sometimes limited, vaulting capabilities, you are faced with a unique set of challenges to keeping your media inventory in order. In an audit situation, you may