Scale Out Backup and Restore (SOBAR)

Scale Out Backup and Restore (SOBAR) is a specialized mechanism for data protection against disaster only for GPFS file systems that are managed by IBM Storage Protect for Space Management.

For such systems, the opportunity exists to:
  1. Pre-migrate all file data into the IBM Storage Protect for Space Management storage
  2. Take a snapshot of the file system structural metadata
  3. Save a backup image of the file system structure
This metadata image backup, consisting of several image files, can be safely stored in the backup pool of the IBM Storage Protect server and later used to restore the file system in the event of a disaster.

The SOBAR utilities include the commands mmbackupconfig, mmrestoreconfig, mmimgbackup, and mmimgrestore. The mmbackupconfig command will record all the configuration information about the file system to be protected and the mmimgbackup command performs a backup of GPFS file system metadata. The resulting configuration data file and the metadata image files can then be copied to the IBM Storage Protect server for protection. In the event of a disaster, the file system can be recovered by recreating the necessary NSD disks, restoring the file system configuration with the mmrestoreconfig command, and then restoring the image of the file system with the mmimgrestore command. The mmrestoreconfig command must be run prior to running the mmimgrestore command. SOBAR will reduce the time needed for a complete restore by utilizing all available bandwidth and all available nodes in the GPFS cluster to process the image data in a highly parallel fashion. It will also permit users to access the file system before all file data has been restored, thereby minimizing the file system down time. Recall from IBM Storage Protect for Space Management of needed file data is performed automatically when a file is first accessed.

These commands cannot be run from a Windows node.

For the full details of the SOBAR procedures and requirements, see Scale Out Backup and Restore (SOBAR).