RE: Backup to Virtual Tape

Disk to Disk in the same ASP can thrash the system. You must have enough storage to hold your system, twice with room to grow and not exceed that 80% mark. (90% or where ever you have your ASP threshold set at.) If you turn on compression your CPU will be pegged. Try a couple of libraries and an IFS directory of two to gauge performance on your system.

Then save them to tape during the day to see what it does to the system. Finally delete the old virtual tapes and see what that does to the system.

If you have lots of arms and are below the 40% mark, It should work well.

Another option is to add a disk controller and drives creating a second ASP to save to.

Or get a Virtual Tape Appliance that will show up as an IBM tape drive to your system. You will still use your tape adapter card to attach the VTA. You move your drive over to the appliance. Make sure the appliance has enough arms to handle the write rate.


Chris Bipes
Director of Information Services
CrossCheck, Inc.

-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Sam_L
Sent: Thursday, August 08, 2013 2:10 PM
To: midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Backup to Virtual Tape

We backup just about everything to tape each night, including the IFS.
I would like to try backing up to a virtual tape, in the hope that it
will be significantly faster, and copy to a real tape during the day.

Does anyone have any "gotchas" or techniques to share?

Things that have come to mind are:

1) Disk space: We have more than enough.
2) We will need to exclude the virtual tape from the backup.
3) We are also running Mimix to a backup machine, so we need to exclude
the virtual tape from replication.