At 20:50 04-09-02, Tung-Sing Chong wrote: >I did look into using Flashcopy on the SHARK and decided to use DDR >instead. I think you can only use flashcopy to copy data within the same >RAID array. The DASD I used (>100 3390-3s) in my demo are on few RADI >arrays. Currently I do not have any plan to change my cloning example to >use flashcopy.
The big problem with FlashCopy is that it copies to the same set of tracks on another volume (or a full volume). In real life this is a PITA but in a demo where you have packs full of identical Linux disks it would work. Say your disk to copy is 330 cylinders, then you only need to set up one pack with 10 x 330 cylinders as your master images and pick the right one to copy from. If your disks contain some white space to allow for the Linux guest to write its own log files etc, then there may be things faster than DDR (as we published in the ISP/ASP redbook) but since you also need to do the formatting it will be a close race and mainly save other resources but time (so only relevant if you clone multiple servers in parallel). Rob
