Backup Services at the University of Maryland

Introduction:

The Office of Information Technology at the University of Maryland provides centralized data protection services for university departments and affiliates.  OIT's data protection service is hosted by IBM's Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM), an enterprise backup and archive software suite that provides data protection for standard files and applications on many leading operating platforms, including Linux, Solaris, Windows, Netware and OS X.  When backing up using OIT's central service, protected data is backed up directly to disk incrementally every night.  An additional copy of the data is then copied to an alternate location away from the main backup server in OIT's primary data center.  In this manner, data protected by TSM is located in two different physical locations and each copy is available for any restore need.

Our institutional data is one of our most critical resources and it grows dramatically each year.  We are pleased to offer this service to university departments and affiliates at a very reasonable price.  Registration for the backup service is restricted to University of Maryland departmental and affiliate servers and faculty/staff workstations. Student workstations and non-University machines will not be eligible for backup service.  We will continually expand our data protection services to meet the growing needs of the University.  We will also review our cost model annually and adjust it accordingly to account for technological capacity improvements and to take advantage of the economies of scale we hope to realize with expansion.  For more information on backup retention plans and current billing rates, please see our service information page.

This site is a starting point for consolidating documentation for the TSM-based OIT data protection service. Please refer to this site for updates concerning the OIT backup service at the U. of Maryland. For more information on the technical and administrative aspects of OIT's backup service you can e-mail the Enterprise Storage and Backup group at backups-help@umd.edu.

News:

Hello UMD Backup And Archiving Service users and stakeholders,

Please note that on Friday, December 9, 2011 there will be a scheduled service outage for OIT Backup and Archiving services. This particular service outage is necessary to migrate the TSM catalog (DB and logs) to a new storage device. Please note the time frame of the outage and the Backup and Archiving services that are impacted.

The Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) server, tivoli.umd.edu, will be unavailable for backup and restores beginning at 2:00pm on December 9, 2011. Service is to be resumed no later than 5:00pm on December 9, 2011. Archiving and retrieving services for that time period will also be interrupted and unavailable. Any existing backup or archiving sessions continuing past 2:00pm will be manually cancelled from the server. Scheduled backup services are expected to resume the evening of December 9, 2011 and proceed as normal.

We apologize for the interruption of service and thank you for your patience. If you have any questions or concerns, please email us at backups-help@umd.edu.

Thank you, OIT Enterprise Storage and Backups

Hello UMD Backup And Archiving Service users and stakeholders,

Please note that on Saturday, August 6th 2011 there will be a scheduled service outage for OIT Backup and Archiving services. The outage is a consequence of data center electrical work being done on August 6th. Please note the time frame of the outage and the Backup and Archiving services that are impacted. This notice is only for Backup and Archiving services. Any other OIT service that may be impacted has been or will be communicated to you separately.

The Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) server, tivoli.umd.edu, will be unavailable for backup and restores beginning at 6:00am on August 6th, 2011. Service is to be resumed no later than 6:00pm on August 6th, 2011. Archiving and retrieving services for that time period will also be interrupted and unavailable. Any existing backup or archiving sessions continuing past 6:00am will be manually cancelled from the server. Scheduled backup services are expected to resume the evening of August 6th, 2011 and proceed as normal.

We apologize for the interruption of service and thank you for your patience. If you have any questions or concerns, please email us at backups-help@umd.edu.

Thank you,

Sergio Fuentes
Enterprise Storage and Backups
Office of Information Technology
University of Maryland
backups-help@umd.edu

The Office of Information Technology (OIT) Enterprise Storage and Backup team has two major announcements regarding data backup services hosted by IBM's Tivoli Storage Manager. The announcements are relevant to both technical administrators and IT business managers and we hope the information is timely and complete:

NEW TSM CLIENT SUPPORT

The Enterprise Storage and Backup group is now supporting TSM Client versions 6.2.2.x and TSM Client versions 5.5.3.x (currently supported). IBM released Backup-Archive Client version 6.2.2.x to the public earlier this year. OIT has tested and has run TSM 6.2.2.x in production for several months now on an as-needed basis. We are now confident with TSM Client 6.2.2.x's stability and encourage users who meet the software and hardware requirements to deploy it as soon as possible. If you are running TSM client versions 5.4.x or lower, note that OIT no longer supports those versions and request that you upgrade to at least 5.5.x as soon as possible.

The new client level includes support for newer operating systems such as Redhat 5 and 6, Windows 2008 and Windows 7 and discontinues support for older operating systems such as Novell Netware. 6.2.2.x also introduces VMWare VSphere API compatibility for both image and file-level backups, true incremental backups for Windows systemstate backups and other feature enhancements. Note, that deduplication is NOT compatible with the current server version that OIT has in production. Therefore, deduplication in the 6.2.2.x client is not currently enabled.

For more information on TSM client 6.2.2.x and OIT's backup service, please see our website at http://www.backups.umd.edu. For software download, visit http://www.backups.umd.edu/software. Reminder: Data backup services are restricted to University of Maryland departmental and affiliate servers and faculty/staff workstations. Student workstations and non-University machines will not be eligible for backup service.

REDUCED BACKUP OCCUPANCY RATES EFFECTIVE IN APRIL

OIT and the Enterprise Storage and Backup group is reducing charged rates of backup occupancy effective April 1st, 2011. The current rate of $.38 per GB of backup data per month will now be $.23 per GB occupied per month. The rate change affects users of backup services only and not archiving services (which charges on a GB transferred rate per a Memorandum of Understanding). Licensing fees will remain the same and will continue to be charged per physical CPU per machine until further notice.

There is no reduction in service due to the rate change. We will still maintain 7 days of backup data on disk and a second copy of all backup data will be sent offsite on a weekly basis. Retention policies will also not be affected.

If you have questions related to chargeback policies or even general TSM technical questions please email us at backups-help@umd.edu or visit our website at: http://www.helpdesk.umd.edu/services/backup/tivoli/.

News Archive

Related Links:

• TSM Client software download
• TSM Client official documentation from IBM