Thanks for all that responded to this posting! The ATL/VTS configuration is useing 3590 backstore tapes. We also have 3490 tapes (non VTS tapes) that we use to ship to Iron Mountain for DR. I was thinking since the VTS drives are useing Raid I can always ask our 3rd party CE to physically switch the drives around. Better yet if anyone has an extra SAA controller cable I could hook it to a laptop and then to the VTS and I think I could format the VTS drives. I think there is also a drive for the VTS controller. As for the physical tapes both the 3490's and the 3590's Phil,
Actually, as R.S. and Daniel indicated you actually have 2 problems. First is to erase the cache and the second is to erase the physical stacking volumes. Let's take the physical stacking volumes first. You have two choices there, are you planning on physically destroying them; or selling them as used cartridges. Physical destruction is easy, just find a company that knows how to shred them and dispose of them in an ecologically sound manner. If you want to sell them as used cartridges, then you will need to degause them programmatically. That is again easy, but takes much more time. First, you would have to eject them from the robot and then re-enter them as standard scratch tapes (this assumes that some of the physical drives are directly attached to the your Mainframe). Or, if you have any compatible drives outside the robot you can degausse them outside the robot. But it takes time. You didn't mention what type of drives, but I am guessing 3590's are the backstore. So you will need some 3590 drives attached to the MF to degause the stacking cartridges. The harder one is the cache devices. As R.S. indicated, you will have to overwrite the cache. One simple method would be to scratch all the virtual volumes and eject nearly all physical stacking volumes. Then, write dummy data to the virtual-volumes until SMS complains that you have run out of space. Russell Witt -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Phil Laddon Sent: Thursday, April 24, 2008 9:23 AM To: IBM-MAIN@BAMA.UA.EDU Subject: VTS drives Data Security Erase The Mainframe is suppose to be shutdown here by June 30Th. I doubt they will make it but I have been tasked with many to do items before that. One of them is to erase degauss the VTS drives on our 3494-S10 before it leaves the building. I found this in a "Red book" 6.18 Data Security Erase In some systems, execution of the data security erase channel command causes random data patterns to be written on a volume to its end-of-tape. Instead, with VTS, the end-of-data (EOD) mark is repositioned at the logical block location at which the command was issued. Any data beyond that logical block location is no longer accessible. When the virtual volume is copied to a stacked volume, only the data up to the EOD mark is written. Any data beyond that point is ignored; it is no longer accessible by the host. The VTS does not take any action or provide any function to erase data on invalidated copies of a logical volume. Although the previous copies of a logical volume are not readily accessible, data on them remains on physical volumes. These copies are not written over until the corresponding stacked volume is reclaimed and the space occupied by the data is subsequently overwritten by new logical volumes. Since we are still running Z/OS V1R4 IBM support will not help me or answer any questions. Does anyone know or has anybody done the Data Security Erase (degauss) for VTS disk drives? If so how did you do it? Thanks, Phil --------------------------------- Be a better friend, newshound, and know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile. Try it now. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
