Re: BRMS and Tiered Storage.

On 14-Oct-2015 11:52 -0600, rob wrote:

Far as I remember BRMS stood for Backup and Recovery Media Services.
In one of Steve Will's recent blogs he mentioned "BRMS Tiers" in
which libraries may be moved on disk based on usage. I didn't really
grasp as to how BRMS fit into that picture. I was thinking that
perhaps they were talking about backing up to virtual tape or some
such thing, and then the virtual tape would be stored on certain
drives based on usage. But it seems to be indicating the actual
production libraries.

Apparently there are some things in "option 2 : BRMS-Advanced
Functions Feature" I wasn't aware of. And we have that installed on
all lpars.

While the option may be /installed/, I believe the feature may be available only with an additional paid license.

The list of results from the following web search, esp. those in which the word "option" is visible, might contain helpful information:
[https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Hierarchical+storage%22+%22BRMS%22]

Included in the results, the following:
[https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/wikis/home?lang=en#/wiki/IBM%20Backup%2C%20Recovery%20and%20Media%20Services%20%28BRMS%29%20for%20i/page/Welcome]
_Welcome to IBM Backup, Recovery & Media Services (BRMS) for i_
"...

_BRMS Advanced Feature_

The BRMS Advanced feature enables Hierarchical Storage Manager (HSM) archive with HSM dynamic retrieval and automated auxiliary storage pool (ASP) data migration. Some of the functions provided by HSM are:

• Automatic, transparent management of data across a storage hierarchy
• Migration of user libraries, folders, and spooled files between ASPs
• Archive (with storage free option)
• Dynamic retrieval
• Automatic movement of data, based on system policies

..."

Note: The "Dynamic Retrieval" is a feature based on the Storage Freed [i.e. STG(*FREE)] capability of the Save; what is also called "Archive" in the above doc snippet. When the data portion of the stg-freed object is "touched", instead of receiving the exception x2203 [aka MCH3403], the storage feature is informed so that the data can be restored automatically from the off-line storage hierarchy [thus AIUI qualifying the data as being stored on what can be referred to as near-line storage].