CCV Backup and Archival Service Announcement 4-8-2008
Contact: Samuel_Fulcomer-AT-brown.edu
The Center for Computation and Visualization (CCV) is formally announcing a campus backup and archival service for research computing at Brown. This document describes the acceptable use policy, fees and technical implementation for the service. This information is subject to change as the service evolves to address the needs of our users…
Background
CCV has licensed and maintains the Tivoli Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) software for incremental backups and archival. TSM supports native binary clients for Linux, Windows, Solaris, MacOS, HP/UX and AIX. CCV maintains two Qualstar automated tape libraries with LTO-3 tape drives, an 88264 with 264 tape slots, and an XLS with roughly 1600 tape slots.
CCV’s TSM system has been used primarily for backup up CCV systems; however, the high capacity of the tape libraries has allowed limited expansion and testing of the system to provide backup services for research data systems in other departments. This has allowed for some optimization and changes of the configuration to accommodate additional load, and the service now appears ready for additional clients.
Acceptable Use
CCV focuses on support of Brown’s computational research and research visualization applications, with some limited support of the use of its facilities by Brown courses.
CCV’s backup/archival service is being made available only for computing systems dedicated to research activities. It explicitly excludes administrative servers and desktops, and instructional computing systems.
CCV’s backup system has not been designed or evaluated for storage of financial, clinical, experimental subject, medical, or any sensitive or embarrassing personally identifiable data. Be sure you know the rules for custody of your data, and don’t send anything sensitive into the backup system. We’ll be looking at whether client-side encryption might be acceptable for some data; however, that’s not resolved at the time of this announcement.
Fees
In order to recover a portion of the costs associated with maintenance and support of the software and hardware systems, the cost of data storage and cleaning tapes, and the projected costs of enhancement and replacement of server and tape library hardware, CCV has established a fee structure for backups that is a function of both the number of tapes a user needs to handle their backups, and also the number of systems being backed up.
At the time of this announcement, the following charges have been approved by the Offices of the Controller and Sponsored Projects:
- Network backup on one computer using Tivoli TSM- charge per tape allocated to the backup group
$12/month
- Additional computers added to the backup group
$4/month
- Archival (user directed), per allocated tape, single copy
$12/month
- Archival (user directed), per allocated tape pair, redundant dual copy
$18/month
Since adding more backup clients, we have determined that TSM cannot efficiently handle many separately allocated tape groups. As a result, the only feasible accounting is by the quantity of data from each client stored in the backup system. Thus, each 600 gigabytes of data will be considered the equivalent of one allocated tape.
As an example, if the Center for Applied Phrenology has six TSM client systems that have accumulated 1.6 terabytes of data in the TSM system, the monthly charge will be $((1600/600*12)+5*4), or $52 (note that gigabytes and terabytes are disambiguated as base-10 numbers).
The current default backup classes create a single tape copy of data. We will add an option for dual copy.
These fees are subject to yearly review, and may be adjusted to reflect changes in software licensing and media pricing.
Technical Implementation
CCV provides management of the TSM server and its resources; however, we do not install or configure the client software as part of the basic service, as this is more properly a system management/administration task on the client machine. In its simplest, the client configuration contains a list of disks/filesystems and rules for explicitly including or excluding files and parts of the directory hierarchy. For each file, the rules are applied until there is a match or the rule list is exhausted (implicit match).
To sign client systems up for backups, send the following information to support-AT-ccv.brown.edu:
- machine name (resolvable through DNS)
- machine OS type and version
- approximate disk space used (this will help us to plan for tape purchases)
- cognizant systems contact, with e-mail address and phone number
- cognizant billing contact, with e-mail address and phone number
Documentation for the TSM clients is available in the “Storage Manager Clients” section of IBM's TSM Documentation .
The client software can be downloaded for the various platforms at ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/storage/tivoli-storage-management/maintenance/client/v5r5/