Re: Long SAVSYS

[Jim Oberholtzer <midrangel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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
> --