Re: Long SAVSYS

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
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