Backup and Recovery of Rational ClearCase VOB Servers Using Storage Area Network

Presented by Kenneth Creager.

Slides

Competent and convincing, but of few interest to us, I believe, because of our using NetApp (superior). Worth the while on sites not using it. Do data validation at backup time (not at recovery).

Personal notes

The goal

Warm high-availability (cheap)

The context

• 23 RD centers, 23000 engineers
• 77 "3rd party" vobs
• EWU: Boulder and San Diego
• Older products in their own region
• Multisite hubs or disaster recovery, one hub at 3.2, the other at 4.2
• Previously Qualcom (bought by Ericsson)
• Some projects have time or money, others not.
• Projects owned vob servers in own regions/sites for update flexibility

History

They were previously using budtool(?) for incremental backup - discontinued product.

rgy and vob were backed up at different times - one needs they are at the same time.
It took a whole week to do the recovery (including data validation)

Solution

• Qlogic SAN technology - Storage Area Network - (concept of cookie). Strictly speaking: not needed.
• Dynamically swap from one machine to another
• Backup rgy, hostname etc...
• 2 mn lock time for baking up the ClearCase configuration
• ClearCase uses alias names for the hosts
• Paths are standardized through soft links
• Note: dbcheck runs as well on unregistered VOBs
• The primary backup is disk
• Recovery procedure:
  • unmount bad disk, mount shadow in place
  • server crash/disk OK (fsck)
  • recoverreplica (30 mn sync)
• Faster than making replicas. These are new VOBs from the point of view of the views!