Data Center Management

A Data Center is a physical center of operations for one or more iSeries systems. Typically, the systems are located in one location and share the same pool of media volumes. This physical proximity makes it easy for an operator to accidentally insert a tape into one system that was used previously on another system, making the backup and recovery system less reliable. Robot Save’s Data Center Management system can help prevent these types of errors by making each system aware of the others’ activity and data content.

Operators typically view the systems they manage as a group, not as multiple individual systems. Volume management is considered a data center activity, not limited to any individual system. Robot Save consolidates the volume-related information in its database to allow volume management and reporting from any system in the data center.

Robot Save does this by designating one system in the data center as the Data Center Management System (DCMS). It controls and routes all communications between the other systems in the data center. Although it is not the central storage location for all data, it acts as the router of data to all systems. The DCMS must be able to communicate with all the other systems in the data center since there is no guarantee that the other systems can communicate with each other. The DCMS becomes a central “routing point” to guarantee communications between systems. You must have Robot Network, the network management software from Help/ Systems, installed and properly configured to set up this type of data center.

Select option 15 from the System Setup Menu to display the Data Center Management panel. Press F1 for help with this panel.

Single and Multiple System Data Centers

When you first install Robot Save, the data center is configured with only one system in it. This system is also the DCMS for that data center. If you have more than one system, each with Robot Save installed, you could have multiple data centers, each containing only one system. Robot Network is not required for this single-system form of data center.

To connect multiple systems into a single data center, you consolidate each of the single-system data centers using the Data Center Management option on the System Setup Menu. Robot Network is required to support a multiple-system data center.

The data center topology (which system is defined as the DCMS and which systems are part of the data center) is not dependent on the Robot Network topology (whether a system is a node, host, or alternate host). However, authorities in Robot Network must be defined so that all systems in the data center can see each other.

System Restoration in a Data Center

If you need to perform a system restoration on one or more systems in a data center, you must restore Robot Network on all systems in the data center. If the system name or IP address has changed, you must reconfigure Robot Network with the correct information before you can use the data center in Robot Save.

Recommendations for Setting Up a Data Center

Use the following recommendations to help you set up a data center in Robot Save.

  • A Robot Save data center includes iSeries systems located in a single location and sharing a centralized pool of tapes. A data center also can consist of a system that has multiple logical partitions (LPARs). It is not an enterprise solution that should be used to manage tapes from a number of different platforms or systems located in remote sites.

  • The data center management system (DCMS) should be the system with the least amount of activity in the data center. Another option might be to assign the fastest system in the data center as the DCMS.

  • The system you select as the DCMS should be the one with the least amount of planned or actual downtime (for example, due to backups or other maintenance actions).

  • Run the Import Forecast report for a system before attempting to include the system in the data center. The report lists the actions that will be taken during the inclusion of the selected system. This allows you to make any changes needed on the system before actually including it in the data center. These changes might include renaming a media type, resolving duplicate names, changing formats of volumes, and so on.

    We strongly recommend that you run the Import Forecast report and resolve any conflicts between systems before actually including a system in the data center. Attempting to resolve these differences after inclusion can be very time consuming. See the discussion on the Import Forecast report, later in this section, for more information on how it can help you in defining your data center.

  • When you run the Import Forecast report or include a system into the data center, there cannot be any activity in Robot Save on the selected system or the DCMS (for example, no backup or restore procedures can be running; users cannot be in the menu system; and so on).

  • The data center operations—Include, Exclude, and Transfer DCMS— should be the only activity on all data center systems at the time they are executed. Users should not be in the menu system and no Robot Save jobs should be running except the three monitor jobs in the RBTSLEEPER subsystem. You should not attempt to exclude a system from the data center at the same time that another user is transferring the DCMS. We recommend that these operations be handled by one person at a time.

  • Robot Save 10 and higher allow you release the tapes used in ad hoc operations to the scratch pool. You specify if you want to release ad hoc tapes on the Media Defaults panel. This value must be the same on all systems in the data center.

Note: We recommend that you do not mirror Robot Save. Mirroring Robot Save in a data center will cause your data to become corrupted.