Safeguard Your IT Infrastructure: The Importance of Automated Configuration Backups

Why should you do this?

There are several reasons why saving this information is advisable, these include recovery from erroneous configuration changes, complete site or system loss for environments without a high availability solution and also for documenting your environment. After all it’s better to be safe than sorry.

Real world consequences

Here at Chilli we’ve seen an incident due to changes made on a Hardware Management Console by a third party. This resulted in Logical Partitions (VM’s) not being able to boot after scheduled maintenance because their profiles had been changed on the HMC. 

As there was no HMC scan reports available to compare the current vs previous configurations correcting the issue took longer than it would have had they been available. While not an actual backup, the HMC scan report is very useful for an incident such as this as it provides detailed information about the Managed System and the Logical Partition (VM) configurations.

Our Solution

As part of Chilli’s Managed Service offering our customers benefit from automated configuration backups of their infrastructure for Storwize, SAN Switches, VIO Servers (virtual device information) along with HMC Scan reports. These backups/reports run as a scheduled task over ssh from our Procare appliances based at the customer sites. The files are then compressed and copied back over the VPN to our central servers using Ansible. We also have exception monitoring in place for the backups and processes that underpin them to ensure any failures are quickly spotted and rectified.

Even if you never require them for recovery or problem determination purposes they are very useful for documenting your environment. All the files are either .xml .txt or .xls format so can be searched for specific items and also added into existing documentation. For security purposes it should be noted that no credentials or other sensitive information is stored in these files.