onbar is an xbsa "compliant" backup mechanism that will work with xbsa
compliant storage devices.

Provided that you have appropriate IBM Informix maintenance and the
IBM Informix product you are using is fully supported I see no reason
why IBM Informix would not help you with support of their component
(onbar).

IBM informix support would be unlikely to be able to provide much
assistance with the Veritas side.

Through the use of the Informix support team you probably get a lot of
assistance in tracking down any problems onbar has quite a nice "fault
finding" utility, the BARDEBUG facility, which can generate various
levels of debug.

This normally provides information that the storgae manager provider
can work with.

If you considered using Tivoli rather than Veritas as your xbsa
complaint storage manager,  then both omponents would be IBMs issue
and the IBM and Tivoli teams would be able to work together to
resolve.

You will need a Veritas Netbackup client on AIX to work with onbar -
it's supported, but not certified on AIX 4.3 and AIX 5.x (only 32 bits
versions).

To see certified and supported storage managers download (excel file)
http://www.ibm.com/software/data/informix/pubs/porting.zip

It's very common to run a central storage manager on one box and IDS on
another box, so the complexity is usually not a problem.

Depending on the tape device(s)'s capacity (MBytes/second) network might
be the bottleneck, but often it's the tape device that's slowest.

what type of LAN are you on? 100 Mbit or Gigabit
or trunced 2 or 4 way Gbit?

How big is your database or even how big is a
level 0?

Then calculate, but you really should have a
private network for this purpose only, because
you will create a very high load on your LAN.

On a Gigabit ethernet conn you can expect 80 MBytes/sec
and a modern LTO tape can write about 75 MBytes/sec.

But if your db is in the half TB range this is not
very short time for restore/backup.

After all it also is worth a test if your IDS can write
80 MBytes/sec in case of restore when doing single threaded
restore.
Normally one goes multithread and parallel to reach proper
speed, but to do this you need more than 1 LTO tape ....

dic_k

sumGirl,

Relax. There are several ways you can backup Informix on AIX using
Veritas:

1. Ontape to disk, and then backup this disk image using NetBackup.
This is a two-step method and will work OK. I compressed my ontape
disk image before backing it up, and then restore from this compressed
image with a named pipe. It worked OK, but the administrative work was
a bit of a hassle.

2. Get Veritas's "infxbsa" XBSA library and use Informix's onbar.
Onbar has a few extra bells and whistles that ontape doesn't, and the
administration is easier. Most Informix DBA's do this.

3. Use onbar's extenal backup method, and a mirroring system like
Flashsnap. This is quite a bit more administration and hardware, but
the backups are very fast. Basically your mirroring the Informix
instance, breaking the mirrors, and backing the mirror up. You should
get Veritas' XBSA library to backup the logical logs separately so you
can take advantage of onbar's bells and whistles.

Hope this helps. I skimmed over a lot of detail, but hopefully this
gives you an idea. Good luck.

Brice Avila