On Mon, 23 Oct 2023 16:19:20 +0300, Arye Shemer <aryeshe...@gmail.com> wrote:

>Only a solution built on software running in z/VM would be accepted by the
>customer.

Why has your customer decided z/VM backup via the cloud? Save money? Offsite 
backup? It's new technology? Don't need to worry because it's the cloud? They 
want to say they are cloud enabled?

Everyone is ignoring the obvious questions. Why would anyone want to do z/VM 
backups to a cloud? What are the advantages and disadvantages? What are your 
customer's expectations? Are they willing to use software that locks them into 
a specific cloud service provider?

Consider Unix, Windows and Apple cloud backup solutions. From those I've seen, 
each cloud service provider has their own proprietary software that seems to 
use SaaS. Most important they are very simplistic (files are a single chunk of 
data with trivial file information). They do not handle complex structures ( 
E.g. databases allocated to disk partitions instead of files). In other words, 
these cloud implementations do not cover 100%. 
 
AFAIK, z/OS does not have cloud backup (Amazon AWS, Google, ???). Instead, 
DFDSS backs up to TS7700 emulated tape drives which completely hides the cloud 
functionality. Unlike UNIX Cloud backup philosophy, I don't believe TS7700 
understands DFDSS backups, incremental backups nor complex z/OS file structures 
(e.g. VSAM). I suspect that TS7700 cloud capabilities are limited to data 
instead of the robust ?aaS offerings (e.g. no SaaS).

For z/VM, both implementations seem feasible to write but both have problems. 
You can FTP to/from Google cloud storage. You can easily FTP the backup files 
but you are transferring large files. Not my first choice but you are cloud 
enabled. The UNIX solution would require that the z/VM backup software exits 
which you can use. Possibly knowledge of the backup file structure. 

I suspect that writing a z/VM cloud backup product would not be profitable 
since most z/VM customers probably don't need it. 

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