RE: iSeries and autoloaders

I have to second (third?) the BRMS sentiment. We purchased it years ago
for tape management and auditing/reporting capabilities. Especially if
you need to rotate your tapes to off-site locations, BRMS will tell
which tapes to move when. Recovery reporting also tracks which current
tapes have your most recent backups - a boon for weekly full saves and
daily partials.

We use it in a 2 LPAR environment (production/development). Each LPAR
has a 3581-H13 (we have less than 200GB per partition, not the
tera-upon-tera Rob has). We load up the slots, run a daily "tape load"
job to let BRMS read the barcodes and assign the tape to the correct
LPAR and device, and that's it. Daily tape moves for last night's
backup, weekly rotation from onsite and offsite locations.

Loyd Goodbar
Senior programmer/analyst
BorgWarner
TS Water Valley
662-473-5713
-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of rob@xxxxxxxxx
Sent: Friday, December 14, 2007 09:36
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Re: iSeries and autoloaders

Three different ways:

1 - Configure the tape drive in "Sequential" mode. Done on the drive
itself. They're normally shipped in "Random" mode. Last step of backup

have it do an OPTION(*UNLOAD). It will kick out the current tape and
automatically load the second tape. And you're all set for the next
night.

2 - Configure the tape in "Random" mode. Purchase BRMS or other tape
management and backup software. Have it handle it.

3 - Configure the tape in "Random" mode. Get very familiar with
commands
like WRKMLBSTS, ADDTAPCTG, RMVTAPCTG, etc. We only used this method on
an
IBM tape drive that will NOT let itself be reconfigured to "Sequential".

Brought in a consultant from Sirius for this one. About every third
sentence was: "If you had BRMS...".

Rob Berendt