We are planning to implement a 100% virtual tape solution (VSM from STK)
with backend T10000 drives in a STK silo. We will have NO real tape drives
attached to our z/OS 1.7 system. (I wasn't actively involved in the choice,
but now I have to implement and make the solution work).
I have several concerns and I was hoping some of you could provide some
practical expierience.
1) The tape drives are 500gig capacity, uncompressed and I'm concerned about
putting hundreds of virtual tapes on a single cartridge. I'm thinking of
perhaps making duplex copies of everything. (of course that wasn't
considered in the vendor proposal)
2) We seem to have bought such a very few cartridges. I have to move, I
think, 1 or 2 tapes offsite for DR purposes, keep some backups on site as
the VSM disk buffer is not that large and I have to move some data offsite
for normal archive purposes. I'm trying to figure out how to do a real
analysis to double check the vendor recomendations.
3) I've got all kinds of retention criteria today from several days to
forever and we currently move tapes between 2 offsite vaults and back onsite
for varying periods of time. With the new system if I move a virtual tape
off site it is offsite for as long as everything else on the cartridge it
was written to, I can't bring one volume back onsite after a couple of days.
I've got to come up with some type of rotation. I'm almost thinking of
keeping an additional copy onsite of everything that goes offsite.
Disaster Recovery is going to be an issue. Today we use a "floor" system
under VM at the DR site to read 20-30 full volume dumps to disk using DFDSS
to get our base system up then we IPL our system and do the rest of the
recovery functions. Now I'm going to need a similar VSM system with silo on
the DR site's floor system just to do my 20-30 full volume restores. But I
can't take my silo software on a tape as I have no tape. I can't take my
VSM manifest on tape as I have no tape on my z/OS system. I guess I'm going
to have to find some outside service location that I can ftp various things
like this to so that I can retrieve them at DR time.
Any suggestions?
you can respond to the group or to me directly
Harold Zbiegien (home email [EMAIL PROTECTED])
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