Copying tapes is fraught with enough potential issues (many illuminated here) that we are not going to consider it...
-----Original Message----- From: The IBM z/VM Operating System [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Mark Wheeler Sent: Friday, June 06, 2008 6:39 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Backup: Twinning Tapes to Remote Tape Unit Can't do that, unless you can guarantee that the tapes at the remote site are longer than the local copy (which would be unlikely). When the backup runs, writing to a given pair of tapes ends when the first one hits EOT. You would also need to a complete copy of the tapes, labels and all, because the tapes are chained together with user labels. If you couldn't do that, then the copy utility would have have to be smart enough to generate the user label records according to VM:Backup specs. Since the VMBACKUP catalog wouldn't know about these tapes, any restores would have to be done using VMBRITS or VMBSAR. Mark L. Wheeler IT Infrastructure, 3M Center B224-4N-20, St Paul MN 55144 Tel: (651) 733-4355, Fax: (651) 736-7689 mlwheeler at mmm.com -- "I have this theory that if one person can go out of their way to show compassion then it will start a chain reaction of the same. People will never know how far a little kindness can go." Rachel Joy Scott "Dodds, Jim" <[EMAIL PROTECTED] du> To Sent by: The IBM [email protected] z/VM Operating cc System <[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject ARK.EDU> Re: Backup: Twinning Tapes to Remote Tape Unit 06/06/2008 08:29 AM Please respond to The IBM z/VM Operating System <[EMAIL PROTECTED] ARK.EDU> I think in the case of having to run 2 backups jobs I would run one backup job and then run a utility job to copy the 1st set of tapes to the remote set of tapes. Jim Dodds Systems Programmer Kentucky State University 400 East Main Street Frankfort, Ky 40601 502 597 6114 -----Original Message----- From: The IBM z/VM Operating System [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Mark Llewellyn Sent: Thursday, June 05, 2008 4:13 PM To: [email protected] Subject: VM:Backup: Twinning Tapes to Remote Tape Unit Greetings, We are ramping up our Technical Recovery Plan, and intend to use channel- extended tape units at a remote location when performing our regular full and incremental backups. We use CA's VM:BACKUP for file-level backups, and will be using VM:HiDRO to capture the system image. We're curious as to whether any other CA customers are using the synchronous tape "twinning" feature with one local tape unit and one remote. We've been cautioned by our network folks that the response time from the remote tape unit would be quite a limiting factor affecting the speed of a synchronous, twinned backup. Our other option is to simply run two backup jobs, one to the local drive and one to the remote, but that effectively doubles the hit of the backup jobs. Any anecdotes or insight would be most welcome! Mark Llewellyn VM Systems Support Visa, Inc.
