Dean Nai wrote: >We have a 3592-E07 and our leasing company is telling us >the following. Anyone have any thoughts? We really don’t >have the funding for a mirrored VTS and if it’s not mirrored >then we lose our DR plan.
How are you set up today? For example, do you simply take periodic backups to physical tape then ship the tapes to your DR site? It's not yet clear to me whether and why you necessarily need a mirrored VTS. >From leasing company. >The first item to be withdrawn from service will be the 3592-C07 >at the end of 2020. The C07 is the controller for the tape >drives and is required for z/OS or z/VM to communicate with the >3592-E07 drives. >IBM has no direct attach tape products for z/OS, z/VM or zVSE. Just to editorialize here, IBM has not offered "direct attach tape products" for those operating systems (or for z/TPF) for a LONG time. There must be a controller in the connection path, either a "smart" or "dumb" one, in order for z/OS, z/VM, z/VSE, and/or z/TPF to use the drives. (Linux is the exception and can work with the drives either way.) IBM maintenance for the last in the line of "dumb" tape controllers, the 3592-C07, is ending at the end of 2020. >The best option is to go with a VTS and locate a 2nd VTS at your >DR site with replication between the two sites. There is also the >option to have an IBM VTS with access to tape drives in a 3584 and >then send those tapes offsite. To be able to use those tapes for >DR you would need another IBM VTS at you DR location. Before suggesting "the" answer, another relevant capability is cloud object storage. There are a couple software products for z/OS that equip z/OS to use cloud object storage -- whether on premises, off premises (public cloud), or both -- as virtual tape. IBM Cloud Tape Connector for z/OS is one such example. The basic approach with Cloud Tape Connector for z/OS is that you'd run your backups pretty much per normal, but the target(s) would be any cloud object storage that supports IBM Cloud Object Storage S3 protocol, Amazon S3, Hitachi HCP protocol, or EMC Elastic Cloud Service Protocol. These storage pools could be public, private, or both. Storage pools can be backed by any sort of media, including physical tape. Cloud Tape Connector for z/OS can encrypt data before it's saved to cloud object storage, and you really ought to do that. For example, you might decide to have one private pool of cloud object storage at your DR site and also buy a subscription to IBM Cloud Object Storage as another, duplicate pool. (IBM then further duplicates your data across IBM's multiple sites. Where and how many depends on your subscription.) Then, in a disaster, you'd need to get at least one basic z/OS instance up and running, with Cloud Tape Connector for z/OS fired up, connect to whichever cloud object storage pool has survived and is reachable, restore, and you're back in business to the last good backup point. In a dire emergency the first two steps would typically start from USB media at the HMC these days. Anyway, that's the "cloud" way to do things, and there's a lot of merit in it. It's also combinable with VTS. For example, perhaps you take backups to both public cloud object storage (encrypted of course) and to remote (DR site) VTS, with no local VTS. There's a lot of flexibility in all of this, including economic flexibility, but I'd like to understand a little more before backing a specific alternative. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Timothy Sipples IT Architect Executive, Digital Asset & Other Industry Solutions, IBM Z & LinuxONE -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: [email protected] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
