I am working up my plan to backup our new Exchange 2003 storage groups. Our environment includes: Exchange 2003 running on Windows 2003 TSM 5.2.2.5 running on AIX 5.2 Shark storage for the AIX server's disk based storage EVA (I think) storage for the Exchange server data LTO1 in a 3584 accessed across a McData 4500 SAN switch
I read through the TDP for Exchange v5.2 documentation. It appears that I cannot split up the different data types (meta, data, logs) into different management classes, but I can put the different backup types (full, copy, incr, diff, dbcopy) into different management classes. My questions are... When doing an incr, or diff backup via TDP, how does TDP do that? I intend to backup the storage groups "full" across the SAN. The storage groups will be 20GB in size. From what the Exchange admins are telling me, Exchange creates log files with a max size of 5MB. During an incr or diff backup, does TDP backup all the log file transaction information as one filename to TSM, allowing for less overhead when using a SAN, or does TDP keep individual log file names intact, backing up each one serially (which would lead me to believe that using the SAN would actually slow things down)? All my experience with TDP is in SQL (and a bit in Domino). Does TDP for Exchange get out of sync as easily as TDP for SQL when dealing with management class name changes? With TDP for SQL, I have to rename the existing filespaces and start with new filespaces whenever I change management class names to ensure the meta stays in sync with the data. Are there any quirks like this in TDP for Exchange? Are there any other things I should be considering? Thanks in advance, Todd
