Re: Saving a hosted LPAR to save all.

[DrFranken <midrange@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I'm not at all worried about them dropping SAVSTG. I believe that was 
announced a decade ago but don't quote me on that. I did speak to some 
folks about it when it was announced and they also had no issue. 
Remember that this code was created when tape drives outstripped the 
ability of IBM i (Then OS/400) to gather data fast enough to keep up 
with the fastest tape drives of the time (3490 or 3590 maybe??). So 
having this ability to simply read sequential sectors at a max drive 
speed helped cut the backup window for some users.

Initially you needed an IDENTICAL disk configuration to do a restore 
from this, later chiefly due to pressure by Al Barsa IBM relaxed this to 
allow a restore to any system that would run the O/S, had a large enough 
load source (Same or bigger as original) and had enough disk to hold the 
entire SAVSTG.

But think about the real world use of SAVSTG. It's ALL or NOTHING on a 
restore and it's definitely a rare day when you can restore 100.00% of 
the system crushing everything else or because the old system is now a 
'smoking hole'. Even then you'll need to add daily backups etc to get 
your data reasonably current.  So the actual value of SAVSTG just isn't 
there any more and for IBM to spend development dollars maintaining it 
makes little sense.


        - Larry "DrFranken" Bolhuis

www.Frankeni.com
www.iDevCloud.com - Personal Development IBM i timeshare service.
www.iInTheCloud.com - Commercial IBM i Cloud Hosting.

On 4/19/2017 7:03 AM, Rob Berendt wrote:
> That's not very reassuring.  IBM has dropped the SAVSTG command.  I fear
> that too many people were getting burnt trying to restore in a situation
> less than a perfect match in hardware.  Then again I talked to a LUG
> member who initiated a few hundred machines that way.
>
>
> Rob Berendt