RE: physical / virtual tape backup file at a time

[Evan Harris <spanner@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Adrienne

your requirement is a little unusual, so I'm not sure I understand it 
completely. It sounds like you have 2 iseries boxes local to you 
(possibly partitions I guess) and one remote iseries; one local 
machine is connected to the remote machine, but the data you want to 
send to the remote machine is on the iseries _not_ connected to the 
remote machine. If this is not your scenario then it seems to me 
there is no need to have tape involved at all. I am not entirely sure 
why you want to use virtual tape - it doesn't seem to make sense to 
my limited understanding of what it can do to use it in this case.

After the save from tape on local machine 1, simply restore the 
object into local machine 2 in a dummy library and then transfer it 
to the remote machine using the SAVRSTOBJ command. It seems to me 
that this would be the most straight forward way to get the file transferred.

Alternatively (presuming space is available) save the file to SAVF on 
local machine 1 using the compress options to reduce it's size. 
Restore the SAVF object then transmit it to the other machine via 
SAVRSTOBJ, or FTP. A SNDNETF will cost you disk space so this might 
be best avoided.

If the machines are partitions then you can in fact connect to the 
remote machine using the virtual lan, so there are even more options

If you only have 10 gb space to do this stuff you may be running some 
risks anyway - what is your storage level and the relative sizes of 
the machines and data involved ? 10gb seems a very small amount to 
play with these days.

It might help get more responses if you just describe your scenario 
without "mixing in" your possible solution. If you have a solution 
you are working on then provide two descriptions, first what your 
situation is and what you want to accomplish, secondly how you 
propose to solve it. I am guessing this might provoke more responses, 
particularly as virtual tape is a relatively new thing.

Hope this helps, or at least prompts more discussion.

Regards
Evan Harris


At 06:16 a.m. 13/03/2007, you wrote:

> Justin,
>
> Thanks for you response but we want to copy one file from a physical
> tape drive to a virtual tape to transfer to another iSeries. We don't
> want to duplicate the entire tape (DUPTAP). We don't have enough disk
> space to copy more than one file from the physical tape drive to the
> virtual. So the iSeries commands we want to learn would be to create a
> virtual tape with no more than 10 GB space used and then copy file #7
> from the physical tape drive to that virtual tape.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Adrienne