Backup, Recovery, and Media Services (BRMS)

 

IBM® Backup, Recovery, and Media Services (BRMS) helps you implement a disciplined approach to managing your backups and provides you with an orderly way to retrieve lost or damaged data.

BRMS is the IBM strategic solution for planning and managing save and restore operations on your System i™ product. BRMS base product provides all of the functions that most System i users need to implement a fully automated, single system, backup, recovery, and media management strategy. Using BRMS, you can manage your most critical and complex save operations, including online backups of Lotus® servers. It also supports parallel save operations of a library or single object using up to 32 tape devices, which shortens the save window by using multiple devices. You can also recover your system fully during a disaster or failure, or restore single objects or libraries from your save media. BRMS can also perform some daily maintenance activities that are related to your backup routine.

In addition to these backup and recovery features, BRMS can support and manage an unlimited number of media, shared tape devices, automated tape libraries, virtual tape devices, and IBM Tivoli® Storage Manager servers. BRMS enables you to track all of your media from creation to expiration. You no longer have to keep track of which items are on which volumes, and worry that you will accidentally write over active data.

As your business needs change and grow, you can add functions to the BRMS base product by purchasing and installing additional options. The Network feature of the BRMS product provides centralized management of multiple BRMS systems within a network using local TCP/IP, Advanced Peer-to-Peer Network (APPN), or both. A BRMS network system shares the inventory and policies associated with media managed within BRMS network group. In addition, users can view the save history of any system in the network from a single system. The networking feature also simplifies media duplication by using one system in the network to duplicate media for another system in the network. The systems in a BRMS network can be other System i platforms or individual i5/OS® partitions.

The Advanced feature of the BRMS product enables Hierarchical Storage Manager (HSM) archive with HSM dynamic retrieval and automated disk pool data migration. Parallel save operations work with the BRMS Advanced feature to allow for parallel archive and parallel dynamic retrieval of a single object. The ability to dynamically retrieve a large database file in parallel helps to reduce the window of the retrieval process. The BRMS Advanced feature allows archive capabilities of database files, stream files, and documents based on frequency of use, inactivity limit, object size, or disk pool thresholds.

BRMS provides both the traditional character-based interface and a graphical user interface (GUI), which is available as a plug-in to iSeries™ Navigator. These interfaces are not mutually exclusive. You can either choose both interfaces, using the character-based interface for some tasks and the BRMS plug-in for others, or you can choose to use one interface exclusively. However, differences between these BRMS interfaces do exist and you should be aware of them.

BRMS is not a replacement for a backup, recovery, and media management strategy; it is a tool that you use to implement your strategy. Before you start doing backups using BRMS or any other product, you should plan your backup and recovery strategy.

 

Parent topic:

Management Central plug-ins

 

Related information


Advantages of using BRMS
Setting up BRMS