RE: VTLs and backup time

With a media library, (physical media or VTL), you can have it save to multiple drives at the same time in parallel.

With physical media you have concerns about how tricky does this make your restores to a different system. However if you're using BRMS it's a no brainer and it automatically figures all this out. Providing the remote system supports multiple drives also. With VTL it's so easy.
While many of my backups would fit on just a tape or two I normally use four drives to kick it into gear.

Back in the dark ages I used to create a data queue with objects in there by size. Then I would have multiple jobs running to different tape drives grabbing objects off of the data queue and saving them.

Study "parallel backups"
https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/i/7.5?topic=backup-performing-serial-concurrent-parallel-backups

Guess how many drives this media library has:
WRKMLBSTS
Device/
Resource Status Allocation
KDVLVTL VARIED ON
TAP43 OPERATIONAL UNPROTECTED
TAP44 OPERATIONAL UNPROTECTED
TAP45 OPERATIONAL UNPROTECTED
TAP46 OPERATIONAL UNPROTECTED
TAP47 OPERATIONAL UNPROTECTED
TAP48 OPERATIONAL UNPROTECTED
TAP49 OPERATIONAL UNPROTECTED
TAP50 OPERATIONAL UNPROTECTED
With this VTL I can add drives on the fly and since they're all virtual there's no physical stuff involved.

We used to have physical media libraries. Heck you can get a smaller media library like the 4300 and it only takes a few U's in your rack. See the number of drives that unit supports, picture, etc at
https://www.ibm.com/storage/tape

And these libraries can be expanded to hold over a hundred tapes. So you have your air gap and you don't have to do any physical handling.

Look strongly at BRMS. The biggest thing is be open to the whole concept and not try to cling on to ancient things like labeling tapes after days of the week, etc. Set up expiration dates and let BRMS handle all that automatically. I think BRMS is now being bundled in.


Rob Berendt