>I'm sure the people planning for the new hardware have considered it.
>I was just concerned that in their plan they had no native physical
tape
>for VM.
Ann,
You should check. Our storage people brought in a remote VTS to replace
tapes that were being physically moved offsite. They were completely
unaware that a production VM system didn't just send tapes offsite, it
had a DR process that required those tapes to be sent to another data
center for recovery. If they had bothered to ask the VM group during
design, instead of when they were ready to implement, they would have
known this. Don't assume that your hardware planning people know
anything about your DR process.
You should have no trouble with your other concern, passing maintenance
tapes between systems. The VTS will happily mount one system's tapes on
other system. You can control that with the foreign tape exit in
VM:Tape. You also need to decide whether you will divide up the virtual
tape drives among your systems statically, or use a drive sharing
product such as MIA or VM:Tape's STAM feature. VTS's have lots of
addresses, so you may have enough to give each system its own.
For those who are wondering, our VTS is in, but the physical tapes
continue to go offsite until we can move the production users to another
system that has a remote vaulting DR process.
Dennis O'Brien
"No government deprives its citizens of rights without asserting that
its actions are "reasonable" and "necessary" for high-sounding reasons
such as "public safety." A right that can be regulated is no right at
all, only a temporary privilege dependent upon the good will of the very
government officials that such right is designed to constrain. --
Herbert W. Titus and William J. Olson, attorneys for GOA
