Hello We recently implemented the Diligent VTFM virtual tape solution.
The VTFM product is something of a mixed bag of worms. While it is performing very well, when the cycles are available, it is not what I would consider a good fit for DR. Since this software has NO standalone compoent and requires a current version of the VDB (Virtual Tape Dababase, a VSAM cluster) to access the virtual volumes, I am having to circumvent these DR issues through other facilities. If you consider that it demands mainframe processor cycles to perform the I/O as well as compression I do not consider this a good tradeoff unless you have 30-40 % of your processor available for Virtual Tape processing. An additional issue we encountered, is the inability to share virtual tapes across systems unless you maintain a common VDB 'and' Tape Catalog (such as CA-1 TMC). We have seperate TMC for each sysplex member and I installed a common VDB, the first time I ran scratch and clean it deleted the virtual tape datasets for the other systems - not good. We are now using a seperate VDB for each sysplex member which means that a virtual tape created on system A is not accessible from any other system than the creator. I do not recommend this product based on my experience with the product. Prior to acquiring VTFM I reviewed the Bus-Tech product, this was about 2 to 3 years ago. This product simply does not have the I/O capacity needed for tape. We were running one (1) bank of 16 3490 drives on two (2) ESCON channels. Our converstions with the vendor indicated that it 'might' be able to equivalent throughput depending on the data. Unless you have a very light tape environment the Bus-Tech solution would not meet your processing requirements. The thing you need to keep in mind is that any mainframe software based Virtual Tape appliance will have to spend processor cycles to not only perform the I/O but to perform the compression we take for granted in the 'traditional' IBM tape hardware. This will take cycles away from 'productive' work for overhead processing. Be very careful when choosing a mainframe Virtual Tape appliance. I do not believe that the technology available today is able to meet tape processing requirements without an abundance of processor. Please feel free to contact me off-list and I will be happy to discuss this environment with you. Robert Rankin MVS Systems Programmer [email protected] 503-823-6913 ; 503-984-1384(mobile) 1120 SW 5th Ave Room 450 Portland, Oregon 97204 -----Original Message----- From: Patty Mabie [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, March 03, 2009 9:46 AM To: [email protected] Subject: IBM VTFM and Bus-tech virtual tape appliance Hi, We have an ancient Magstar with A50 controller and 4 B1A drives. Needless to say, it is a bottleneck and we have done what we can to ameliorate. I'm interested in replacing the tapes with one of these virtual tape solutions. I wonder if anyone is using them and, if so, what kind of experience you've had? Also, the VTFM software indicates you can FTP your DR backups off site. Is anyone doing this and recovering at Sungard? Would like your comments on that as well. Thanks, Patty ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
