RE: Thoughts on VTL solutions

If you want to maintain your BRMS data do not use DUPTAP. You'll get a copy
of the tape, and that's it. And it will be very labor intensive.

DUPMEDBRM is much easier and will maintain the BRMS data you will
undoubtably need. You can set which tapes to duplicate and just let BRMS
do it's thing. If the vendor charges you more than two hours to get it all
done,(not including tape time, but actual human time) then they are lying to
you about the effort needed. (really it's about 30 minutes to be honest)

--
Jim Oberholtzer
Agile Technology Architects

-----Original Message-----
From: MIDRANGE-L <midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of
Laurence Chiu
Sent: Thursday, May 21, 2020 3:27 PM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: Thoughts on VTL solutions

On Wed, May 20, 2020 at 7:36 AM DrFranken <midrange@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> And if the data in PT is deduped, then this will be maintained in
the > target VTL? DSI does support deduping but I don't know

> if the algorithms on PT and DSI are compatible

Short answer: "They aren't but you don't care." :-)

When you are reading from the source VTL it will re-constitute, or
assemble, everything needed to make IBM i think the entire tape is
there. It will feed that down the fiber channel port. Then the DUPTAP
process (DUPMEDBRM uses that) feeds that data over to the new DSI VTL.
It then does its own internal deduplication as it stores the data on
its disks.

As Jim mentioned if the two DSI VTLs are connected already then they
can replicate the tapes between them and that WILL be a deduplicated
replication.

Yes that is what a vendor told me. Connect their solution to the fibre
channel switch that the current PT unit is connected to (and hence to the
Power server). Either runs BRMS and do the DUPTAP thing or they have a tool
that does the same. It will read from the PT, the data will be reconstituted
from the backup and then deduped back into the new VTL.

Remember that the VTLs need to maintain the 'illusion' that the full
tape is always there! IBM i has no clue that duplicated data is stored
only once. SO IBM I gets full tapes and writes full tapes.

As to how long this will take, yeah 'some minutes' indeed. I can't
really even hazard a guess without knowing how many tape volumes, how
much is on them, how fast is the FC Interface in use, and what size
DSI unit you acquire. And even WITH all of that it would be at best, a

Guess.

The vendor is offering to do this on prem so over FC it should be okay (22TB
of actual backups so not large). But we are also thinking of doing this over
a WAN at 200Mbs since the new Power infrastructure is in a different geo so
this would save shipping the VTL.So time is now going to be relevant.

Thanks again. It's good to have vendor proposals independently confirmed.

- Larry "DrFranken" Bolhuis

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

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