Couldn't agree more with Jim......
We are actually transitioning from a mix of physical tape and TSM into VTL. Results have been great so far.
Part of my concern about a VTL is can it be used as a alternate IPL device? If not, can it at least be used as an alternate installation device? <Yes, I did a bare metal construction of two DR systems from replicated production system saves that were taken from 1000 miles away. Oh, and because there was an existing baseline for deduplication between the prod and DR site, it only took about 1 hour after the FSS for the deltas to be replicated to the DR VTL....meaning I was ready to restore my DR copy 1000 miles away only one hour after the source save completed. This was two systems that were around 600GB each at the time. Note: I did need to boot from I_BASE to make this happen but I hear they have enhancements to make it a full alternate IPL device. Not a big deal to me if I need to keep LIC handy.>
Do you consider two VTL's, a county apart, a complete solution? Our primary site is in one county, our HA site (which you've visited) is in the next. <Yes, but only if you are properly replicating the tape pools. You will want to 1) employ BRMS network, and 2) replicate Prod tapes to DR and DR tapes to Prod. Note: Tape in this case is a file record but nevertheless looks like a tape to BRMS.>
Are you totally done with tapes then? <Pretty much, except for those rare scenarios where you have to ship data to a site that is not in your VTL replication map. In this case I recommend a sharable single LTO drive in the CEC. As for the legacy tapes pre-VTL, you could keep them as is or duplicate into the VTL using BRMS. If you want to keep them on physical media be sure to keep some hardware around that can read the tape(s).>
What about the requests for saving this library off to tape and then delete it from the system? And save the tape indefinitely? <Setup a permanent control group in BRMS and then save to your VTL. If you run out of space on the VTL SAN and choose not to increase it, then you could always dupe the "tape" back to physical media for cold storage and then delete the virtual tape record(s). Note: if you ever do get a VTL this is a good reason to always set your virtual tape size equal to an available physical media size.....just in case you need to duplicate to physical media. (You can technically make your VTL tapes any size).>
Note: We also use Iron Mountain.
We have multiple lpars saving to the same tape library via fiber SAN. Is this supported? <Of course, including NPIV over the same I/O card. I do the same thing with VTL.>
Our largest consumer of tapes is our one Linux lpar. We have three of the six drives, and half of the 100+ slots, in our tape library dedicated to that. The sole purpose of this lpar is to run TSM (Tivoli Storage Manager). Does TSM play well with VTL's? TSM is used to back up PC's and related servers. <This I am not sure of. I can tell you that some of the VTL deduplication appliances do much more than emulate a VTL. Most have NFS, and CIFS functions that are typical backup mediums for open systems. Do not be concerned about slot, drive, and cap limits. Mine is currently set to 5000 and it will support a whole lot more once I get the PTF to increase IBMi support for greater than 5000 elements.>
I assume that BRMS plays well with VTL's, right? <Absolutely, so does many of the other popular backup packages. Remember it looks just like a tape library/drive to the IBMi.>
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Bradford Lovelady
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Tel 205-938-1999 l Cell 205-826-2834
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-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of rob@xxxxxxxxx
Sent: Tuesday, April 23, 2013 9:02 AM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: VTL Was: Long SAVSYS
Part of my concern about a VTL is can it be used as a alternate IPL device? If not, can it at least be used as an alternate installation device?
Do you consider two VTL's, a county apart, a complete solution? Our primary site is in one county, our HA site (which you've visited) is in the next.
Are you totally done with tapes then?
What about the requests for saving this library off to tape and then delete it from the system? And save the tape indefinitely?
Note: We also use Iron Mountain.
We have multiple lpars saving to the same tape library via fiber SAN. Is this supported?
Our largest consumer of tapes is our one Linux lpar. We have three of the six drives, and half of the 100+ slots, in our tape library dedicated to that. The sole purpose of this lpar is to run TSM (Tivoli Storage Manager). Does TSM play well with VTL's? TSM is used to back up PC's and related servers.
I assume that BRMS plays well with VTL's, right?
Rob Berendt
--
IBM Certified System Administrator - IBM i 6.1 Group Dekko Dept 1600 Mail to: 2505 Dekko Drive
Garrett, IN 46738
Ship to: Dock 108
6928N 400E
Kendallville, IN 46755
http://www.dekko.com
From: Jim Oberholtzer <midrangel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Date: 04/23/2013 09:44 AM
Subject: Re: Long SAVSYS
Sent by: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Actually the original post was about how long the SAVSYS took, and this
has morphed into a tape management discussion, all good but still a
change.
Rob, you are and have been making a case for dumping physical tape
altogether and going with a Virtual Tape library (VTL) where the
storage costs can be lower than LTO5 or LTO6 tape. (a stretch with
LTO4). When you consider reliability, speed of the back up (back to the
original post) and all other considerations, the VTL starts to shine.
If you need to budget for $20K worth of tapes, then you've way crossed
the line into a VTL is cheaper, faster, better territory.
Any VTL will give you the parallel save capability discussed earlier,
and since you would need that same VTL for a recovery, the parallelism
issue goes away for that.
This entire discussion has confirmed my belief that a VTL is a far
superior solution to physical tape. You just need a second one off site
that is replicated to the primary to have a complete solution.
Jim Oberholtzer
Chief Technical Architect
Agile Technology Architects
On 4/23/2013 7:37 AM, rob@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
We tend to reset the statistics on a periodic basis. I can understand
the
reasons for not doing so though. Jim had a good point about "over the
lifetime of the tape".
We reset them so that that when we do a full system save and it's taking
4
tapes we know how many bytes are on that last tape and are we getting
close to needing a fifth? If so, maybe we need to think about ordering
more tapes. It's not like the reel to reel drive we used to have that
had
a bar graph of how full the tape was during the process.
And, if the statistics span a period of time when a bad drive was
spewing
most of the errors we want to get those out of the system.
Rob Berendt
-- IBM Certified System Administrator - IBM i 6.1 Group Dekko Dept
1600 Mail to: 2505 Dekko Drive Garrett, IN 46738 Ship to: Dock 108
6928N 400E Kendallville, IN 46755 http://www.dekko.com
--
midrange.com
