RE: Physical Tape Alternatives?

Oh, and we use BRMS. We do not care about any special naming like:
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We typically use day of week (Sunday - Saturday) and BOM for beginning of month in our label names.
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We tell it we want to restore this file from this library. BRMS shows us a list of various dates it was saved. We pick the date and it goes out and finds the right volumes. Loads them up and restores the file.
I used to use naming like you described. When I went to BRMS I abandoned it, immediately. It made NO sense anymore. You apply the right expiration interval to your saves. For example, our quarterly saves are saved for 377 days (just over a year). Our Monday saves are saved for six weeks. Our daily saves are kept for 14 days. BRMS can grab whatever volume out of the pool which has been expired the longest to use next. It tracks all that. And, yes, it tracks who has been expired the longest. Just in case you want to restore from an expired tape which has yet to be reused.

Paranoid of how you will determine your volume when restoring from a DR scenario? Well, you run a daily report which shows you how to use which volumes to do a bare metal restore. I use OVRPRTF to generate them as PDF and then I send the PDF's to three geographically dispersed servers. I have used these reports to do bare metal restores.
Beats the snot out of looking for that spreadsheet or handwritten list describing volume names.

Multi lpar shop? Then you want the networking feature. Each lpar will track the volumes. LPAR2 died? LPAR1 can generate the BRMS recovery report for LPAR2. LPAR2 needs additional tapes to do backups? It will see if LPAR1 has a bunch of extra which are expired and will snag them from him. No need to use special volume names to keep track of which of the hundreds of tapes in your library belong to what system.

Want to run parallel saves to get faster backup? Have the system automatically scatter them across the tapes? Concerned this may make restoration a nightmare? Not with BRMS (providing your recovery site has the appropriate number of drives in it's library). Again, I've done bare metal restores this way. Much better than the days of me dumping objects into a data queue for four saves running at the same time using different tape devices.

Rob Berendt