Enable mmbackup to run into remote mounted file systems.

              Many Customers have preference using specific and dedicated Networks to perform backups with IBM Spectrum Protect with Spectrum Scale. Today this is not possible using mmbackup because the tool can only be used on the local cluster. This request has as main objective to segregate the workloads (production data with the backup data) each one using its own specific network using mmbackup. This can lead customer, like ourselves, to not use the mmbackup tool, resorting to posix dsmc plain backup, which will not achieve the backup window.

              Currently running Spectrum Scale mmbackup on the Local Cluster, the traffic for the gpfs reads at the ESS from the Protect client will traverse the Production Network since we can’t set a subnet for a subset of nodes. That is, the mmbackup workload uses the Production network, not the Backup network, which could generate unwanted traffic on the Production network.

In this way, in order to completely separate the backup with production data traffic, we suggest that mmbackup can be allowed to be executed in a remote cluster enabling a specific private network to be used by the Backup remote cluster for data traffic. The main commands will be done via dmsc in any case. We could enable policies to be done via GUI as an idea on how to make this doable with less coding effort.

              The mmbackup command encapsulates the mmapplypolicy command to list the files to be copied, and then it split the shadow file into multiple files to be processed by the dsmc expire and dsmc incr/selective, in the nodes where Spectrum protect client is installed.

An alternative idea, if the policy could not be done using rest api at GUI, it could be launched the mmbackup from the remote cluster. Then it issues the mmapplypolicy remotely, at the file system owner cluster and once the shadowfiles are updated, launch the dsmc commands within the nodes specified on -N command.