On Monday, 05/19/2008 at 01:12 EDT, Alan Ackerman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > One of my managers told me that since you could make both ECKD (FICON) > and SCSI (FCP) connections to the same IBM Storage subsystem, z/Linux > should be able to read z/OS data off the z/OS volumes, without any > special formatting by z/OS. I asked IBM and they said it couldn't be > done - z/Linux cannot read z/OS data and vice-versa. > > Is this correct?
While it is true that an FCP adapter using SCSI cannot access z/OS data (the storage controllers will not allow it), Linux using ECKD (FICON, ESCON) can easily access z/OS volumes. > If so, what would it take to make z/Linux able to read z/OS data > directly? New drivers? A new file system? How hard would this be to > write? Technically possible, but a bad idea. How do you serialize access to the data? You can't even depend on Reserve/Release to protect you if you're using a sysplex. > Our objective is to lower z/OS > MIPS by moving workload to z/Linux. A network "mount" would certainly > cost some z/OS MIPS. Moving workload to z/Linux without moving data > would save money because IFLs cost less than standard engines and the > software cost of Linux is lower than that of z/OS. Perish the thought. No way. Not at a bank of all places! You need to move the application that creates the data to the same platform that reads the data. Or you need to replicate the data at intervals (at the application layer or by shutting down the app). Data replication, however, is one of the messes that Security People are trying to clean up. It makes it very hard to protect the data by encryption. If you access the data via NFS or remote database protocols, all that is taken care of for you. See my other post for additional audit concerns. Alan Altmark z/VM Development IBM Endicott ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
