RE: Backing up the iSeries to a VTL appliance

Did you have any concerns with disaster recovery? Basically could you
boot off a full system save mounted on the VTL? Could you load tapes in
the physical drive and recover using a pass through feature?



Chris Bipes
Director of Information Services
CrossCheck, Inc.


-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Charles Wilt
Sent: Thursday, August 14, 2008 9:25 PM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Re: Backing up the iSeries to a VTL appliance

Chris,

I used a Cybernetics VTL at prior job. It was connected to the iSeries
via SCSI and to the network via iSCSI. So both our iSeries and our PC
servers were backing up to it.

Seemed to work well for the most part, I did wish the appliance
software, used to move data from the virtual tape to physical, was a bit
more advanced. Mainly I was trying to use it in a way it really wasn't
designed for...don't remember the details. But that was a couple of
years ago and the device was pretty new. So it probably has advanced
some by now.

Also at the time, one other downside was teh Cybernetics device stored
data uncompressed on the virtual tapes. There was a competing product
that store compressed but the $$$ was considerably higher.

HTH,
Charles Wilt