RE: Save While Active Question

Hi John

My experience has been pretty good with save while active, although you need
to take care how you save your libraries to ensure your save has some
internal consistency and integrity across library boundaries.

Basically in your situation what I would shoot for is to shutdown all
activity as you are already doing, and then start the save while active on
the required libraries, specifying a save while active message queue.

In the backup program, just before the actual save process is initiated,
submit a job that reads messages from this message queue. When the save
while active checkpoint is reached a message arrives on the message queue
signaling that you can safely re-start your production processes and let the
save continue on in the background.

The backup itself will take longer but you will reach the checkpoint much,
much quicker; since the system is available the additional backup time is
not such an issue. Obviously there may be also a performance penalty on your
production jobs.

Some things like save files can cause problems, for instance if you are
saving to a save file that's being saved, but I have not seen any other
major issues providing the save is set up correctly.

If you need more detail feel free to ask.

Regards
Evan Harris


-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of John Candidi
Sent: Tuesday, 21 April 2009 12:17 a.m.
To: midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Save While Active Question



John A. Candidi
American European Insurance Group
AS400 & POINT Application Manager
856-779-2274
jacandidi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx<mailto:jacandidi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>



-----Original Message-----
From: John Candidi
Sent: Monday, April 20, 2009 8:01 AM
To: 'midrange-l-owner@xxxxxxxxxxxx'
Subject: Save While Active Question

We have about 20 libraries we save every night to a 3580 tape drive. 2 of
them have quite a few objects. We are being asked to allow some form of
processing each night while the save is going on so I wanted to use the save
while active option? Currently, the backup takes only about 45 minutes. In
anybody's experience, will this increase the time it takes to run the backup
or cause any other problems in your experience? It really all boils down to
the potential that 10-12 files may open from ONE of the libraries at some
point during the save. The system is not in a restricted state while doing
this save since they are all basically user libraries.

John A. Candidi
American European Insurance Group
AS400 & POINT Application Manager
856-779-2274
jacandidi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx<mailto:jacandidi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>