life after the conversion. now that the conversion is complete, there is no reason to put copycat on...

Life after the conversion

Life after the conversion

Now that the conversion is complete, there is no reason to put Copycat on the shelf.

VTS clean up

If you find yourself running low on tapes within the VTS, you can quickly offload low usage volumes back out to physical drives to obtain more scratch volumes within the VTS. Keep a list of Datasets that would qualify for quick offloads and keep the JCL handy. Remember to scratch the input tapes after the copies to release them back to the system.

VTS offloads

Find volumes that are created in the VTS and are never

used again for input. Look for volumes that would sit in the VTS for a week or two without being used and copy them out to a slower tape media.

Merging Application volumes

Merging application volumes can be a real saving of tape usage. You need to do a little homework on this one.

Let’s take a look at our mega-byte usage report again. What we want is a series of tapes in a job stream that is only being use 50 % or less. Perhaps this job stream creates daily tapes that we keep onsite for two weeks and scratch. You could set up a job on Saturday to Copycat the 5 days worth of data onto a single volume and retain the weeks’ worth on data on a single volume using the STACK feature. On Monday scratch the five input volumes and return them to scratch pool. Upon the creation of the new output volume, use the OUTDISP=RETPD=14 in Copycat to give the volume 14 days retention.

Be sure that the datasets in question are not used at the same time for input. This will cause an allocation issue.

DR Tapes – Use of Large Capacity Tapes

Currently, an ongoing problem is magnetic media being lost or stolen during movement to an off-site location. One way is cut down on the number of tapes you are sending offsite is use of the new large capacity drives. Some of the new drives can hold up to 1 terabyte per cartridge. One example is to take your DFDSS/FDR full volume dumps and use Copycat to merge all of the backups to the new capacity drive thus sending fewer tapes to the offsite location.

Pro: Less tapes being moved, less chance of losing tape. Better utilization of tape capacity.

Con: DR restore time of the datacenter with one/two volumes could take forever.

Solution: UNSTACK the volumes at DR.

Copycat has a feature that allows you to take a multiple file tape and un-stack the files to single volume sets. The following shows an example of 4 backups that are now a single volume after Copycat created the tape.

Volser – 100000

File 1. FDRABR.VPROD01.BACKUP




After the UNSTACK of the backup tape.

Volser – 100000 - File 1. FDRABR.VPROD01.BACKUP




With the four different volumes, you can use four drives to restore your system at DR in place of the one volume.

Gold Copy - Use of Duplex

We have been hearing a lot about the “Gold Copy” when it comes to offsite backups. Gold Copy is a third backup that is stored at a location other than the datacenter or DR/Offsite and on a different media type.

For Example:

Copy 1 – At the datacenter on VTS

Copy 2- Offsite using a high capacity tape.

Copy 3 – Offsite at a location other than Copy 1 and Copy 2 and on a different media than the other two copies. This is the Gold Copy.

Within Copycat there is a DUPLEX parameter that allows you to create two copies of the input tape that can be on different media. With one run of Copycat you can create copies for your offsite/DR and the Gold Copy!

Use of the Copycat Control File

One issue with merging files together is mixed EXPDT/RETPD on the volume. With the use of the CTLFILE= parameter in Copycat, we can control what the first file on the tape is going to be.

Let’s take a look at the control statements for this:

FILECOPY

FILES=ALL,SAVEINFO=YES

RECATLG=PREV

INDISP=SAME

OUTDISP=SAME

INUNIT=TAPE

OUTUNIT=TAPE

SORT=NO

CTLFILE=PROD.FDR.OFFSITE.BACKUP30

INPUT=*

123457

Control File Cont.

In this example, we are going to Copycat volser 123457 and the first file on this tape is:

PROD.FDR.OFFSITE.BACKUP30. This is a production FDR backup tape that is going to be offsite for 30 days.

Add an entry in the RMF or Vault Pattern to move this DSN offsite for 30 days and bring it back to the datacenter. Doing this, prevents confusion within tape management if there are mixed EXPDT/RETPD on the volumes.

Things that FILECOPY Doesn’t Agree With

Filecopy has an issue with a few applications. The function of Filecopy is to take single or multiple file tapes and merge them together. Some applications do not use standard OS file labels when data is added to the tape. They keep track of the volser, the starting block number of your data, and how many blocks of data you have. DFHSM is one example that operators in this type of file structure. DFHSM volumes are tracked as an EDM within tape management and second information is not stored.

Applications that should not be used with Filecopy are as follows:

1) Foreign volumes to CA TLMS.

2) DFHSM backups.

3) IBM/Tivoli ADSM (TSM) tapes.

4) IBM DB2 tapes (if DB2 doesn’t catalog them)

5) SAS tapes that are multi-volume

6) CA-Dispatch (can be used with TAPECOPY)

7) Any datasets identified in the EDM member of PPOPTION

life after the conversion. now that the conversion is complete, there is no reason to put copycat on...

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