Teamsite SAN backup strategy

System

Hi,

My company is running Teamsite 6.1 on Windows 2003. To get better drive performance, my company is looking into storing iw-store on SAN.

If we store iw-store on SAN, how do we handle our SAN cloning and backup processes? The group that handles backup in my company wants to implement the following cloning process:

1. Start cloning
2. Before fracturing the clone, shut down Teamsite
3. Fracture clone
4. Start Teamsite

The process is only used to clone the iw-store SAN drive. They will still perform daily backup against the production machine. The cloned copy of the SAN will be used for quick restore or iw-store check, in the case of database corruption.

My questions:

1. If I just freeze the Teamsite application, will the cloning process work correctly? I would prefer not to shut down Teamsite daily.
2. If you use SAN for your Teamsite servers running Windows 2003, what is your backup strategy?

Our Server Setup:

Dell 6650 / Windows 2003
Planned SAN box: DELL/EMC SAN box
Backup software: Galaxy

Thanks,

Migrateduser

I'm not familiar with the cloning process on SAN, but if the process is able to handle open file handles, then using iwfreeze is good enough to keep the integrity of TeamSite backing-store. when backing store is frozen, it still have open file handles, but all of them are for readonly purpose.

How long does the fracture process takes? if it's within minutes, I think it should be fine to do it that way by stopping TeamSite service. If longer than that, you can use the snap shot capability of EMC SAN to capture it. For a backing store of about 35 GB, it only took less than 5 minutes. This process will only bring down TS for 5 minutes, then you can do whatever needed for your backup on the snapshot image.