Someone there may be getting confused. The IBM DS8300 is a virtual tape system. It can work standalone as a disk based VTS or, in conjunction with the robotics side to make it a tape based VTS system (with a very large disk cache).
Then, there is the IBM TS1120. These are real tape drives (not virtual). So, if your VM system can get access to your IBM TS1120 drives, just backup to them for off site storage. If you can only get access to the virtual tapes, then backup to a virtual tape and, on a system that has access to the IBM TS1120, do a tape copy from the virtual tape located in the IBM DS8300 to a real tape mounted in the IBM TS1120. The IBM TS1120 drives support hardware encryption. That is great. However, in a disaster recovery situation, it may not be so great. Until you get the disaster recovery tested with encryption, you may want to create your VM recovery tapes, without encryption enabled. With the VTS, you do have to execute some code to tell the VTS what tape you want. VMTAPE should be able to handle this. Tom Duerbusch THD Consulting Law of Cat Obstruction A cat must lay on the floor in such a position to obstruct the maximum amount of human foot traffic. >>> "Smith, Ann (ISD, IT)" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 3/24/2008 1:41 PM >>> We are running zVM 5.2 and currently still have manual 3490 tape drives. We may soon be getting an IBM DS8300 (shared with zOS) with TS1120 virtual tape. We have 5 VM systems with separate VMTAPE catalogs. They currently do not have any native physical tape drives planned for the VM systems. We normally do maintenance on 1 VM system and use DDR and SPXTAPE to propogate to the other VM systems. Is anyone familiar with using virtual tape with DDR and SPXTAPE? Can I just VMTAPE mount the virtual tape as a FOREIGN tape and be able to do DDR restore and/or SPXTAPE load? I am also wondering about how to do SPXTAPE's for DR. Any suggestions would be appreciated. Ann Smith Mainframe Systems Support -zVM and zLinux Support Integrated Technology Delivery IBM Global Service Integrated Operations At The Hartford Work phone: 860-547-6110 Pager: 800-204-6367 Email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] ************************************************************************* This communication, including attachments, is for the exclusive use of addressee and may contain proprietary, confidential and/or privileged information. If you are not the intended recipient, any use, copying, disclosure, dissemination or distribution is strictly prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient, please notify the sender immediately by return e-mail, delete this communication and destroy all copies. *************************************************************************
