Bill, Good questions, but still not enough of them. There is also the concern about "do you have the devices needed to read the tapes" after xx years? For example, I know some shops still have a rack of 3420 round reels. They haven't had a 3420 device for the past 10 years; but still have a rack of round reels. Even if they had a 3420 device, do you think they could still read the data off the tape.
You state that from a capacity standpoint it is not practical to keep 99365 files forever. Here I must disagree with you. There are many tape-copy/stacking utilities out there, some for a specific tape management system and some more generic. But they all do basically the same thing; copy and stack data while updating the tape management system to reflect the original creation information (jobname, date, etc..). Also, the capacity of cartridges has gotten very-very large. Now, most shops would never think about putting 1-TB of HSM archive data onto a single tape (the single-threading of recalls would be a huge delay); but for long term retention they are great. You stack a couple of hundred/thousand 3480/3490 datasets onto two cartridges (always have a backup when the basket is that large) and you can set it on the shelf for 5-10 years. Then, take it off the shelf and copy it to the new latest/greatest cartridge type (what, 1-Pb by then I imagine). The real trick is to move the media forward at least every 5-10 years for the old data AND to stack these long-term files together to cut down on the media costs. The cost of a couple of high-capacity cartridges and letting them sit on a shelf is minor. Of course the cost of the device is high, but you would be upgrading at least every 5-10 years anyway. Just some other options to consider. Russell Witt CA-1 L2 Support Manager -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:ibm-m...@bama.ua.edu]on Behalf Of William Bishop Sent: Thursday, June 11, 2009 7:01 AM To: IBM-MAIN@bama.ua.edu Subject: Re: Tape retention question This question is more about the tapes we created years ago before we went to an SMS enviornment and how do sites "clean-up" tapes that sit for several years that for the most part were from application sets that we no longer run. A second type would be for retired applications, do you keep all the GDGs that existed when the application stopped? How many do versions you keep? For how long? I believe most of us have to beg the old application owners to review their files and tell us when we can get rid of them, but I am asking is do some sites have a process that says after x years, unless specifically requested, old tape files get deleted? Expdt=99365 says to keep the files forever, but from a legal standpoint, and from a capacity standpoint, that is not always practical. Also, in olden days, expiration date managment was left more to the original jcl developers. Thanks Bill Bishop Specialist Mainframe Support Group Server Development & Support Toyota Motor Engineering & Manufacturing North America, Inc. bill.bis...@tema.toyota.com (502) 570-6143 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
