I believe you can, but can you restore a full save from it? No. Thus you
would then have to DUPTAP that to LTO or other external solution for it
to have any real value.
It will consume a LOT of disk space, pretty much as much as you are
using today. (GO figure!) You could do compression but that will be
software compression meaning the system CPU is doing it thus slowing
everything down.
As others have mentioned it will be competing with the backup for the
same drives. So given almost no system with 1 core of IBM i can keep up
with an LTO7 or even LTO6 drive because the disk subsystem is not robust
enough. Now add the writing to the virtual tape on those drives and you
might actually DOUBLE the time the backup takes.
Thus far I have yet to see virtual tape on IBM i beat the performance of
a properly selected LTO device, not even close.
IBM says in their doco: "Your backups will be faster." But I was present
when they announced this stuff. We asked "REALLY?" they said "Yes,
equivalent to 2 or 3x!" We then asked: "Soooo how many DASD Units in
your test?" IBM said: "Only about 300 (THREE HUNDRED) it's all we had
available during the test." (face plant) Who has 300 disks in their
system that are all only half full!?!
Now on the flipside there are still benefits. 1) You have this backup on
disk. So if silly Sally in accounting smokes a table you can restore it
el-quicko because the backup is sitting right there. No searching for
tape from last night. 2) Once that DUPTAP is completed you can move it
off-site straightaway and yet you still have an on-site copy there for
your use.
So consider the pros and the cons for your shop.
- Larry "DrFranken" Bolhuis
www.Frankeni.com
www.iDevCloud.com - Personal Development IBM i timeshare service.
www.iInTheCloud.com - Commercial IBM i Cloud Hosting.
On 3/4/2019 9:45 AM, Justin Taylor wrote:
Can you do a GO SAVE 21 to a virtual tape?
TIA
midrange.com
