Mirroring the must-have elements of Jazz, technical sessions at SHARE Kansas City (Aug. 4-8) will provide mainframers with the instruments and blue notes they need to flex their improvisation muscles in harmony with the rhythm of their careers. Enterprise data storage is a key element of business operations today and moving that data from one location to another can be daunting. In their “I’ve Got to Move How Much Tape Data? By When?” session on Aug. 5 at SHARE Kansas City, JP Lavigne, product manager at IBM, and Steve Pryor, chief technology officer at DTS Software, will answer mainframers’ questions about moving data to new devices.
Enterprise data on tape or virtual tape must be migrated carefully during a hardware refresh or tape vendor change. Much of the older data on physical tape has been migrated to modern disk-only, virtual tape systems, according to Pryor. “This is also mostly true of earlier generation ‘hybrid’ virtual tape systems that used a combination of disk cache and physical tape,” he adds. There are still some places where these types of storage still exist, though, and this data must be migrated when new devices are installed.
According to JP Lavigne, “Another of the main situations in which data must be moved is when hardware comes off lease and a new solution is coming in to replace it. This could also be replacing a solution to let new technologies as well. It could also be due to moving or relocating data centers, opening a disaster recovery site in another city, state, or country, or moving to a colocation.” When data is migrated, allocation issues can surface in relation to storage management.
Pryor points out that earlier data storage systems are being replaced by newer systems, including IBM’s TS7700 family, Optica zVT, and Dell/EMC DLm, because they offer better availability, performance, and features. These features can include using cloud storage for tape volumes, as well as redundancy and ransomware protections. “Some of the challenges of migrating data from one device to another include identifying all data that needs to be moved, how to manage the migration so that production work can continue, and how to handle migration for applications that maintain their own meta data,” explains Pryor.
Best Practices for Data Migration
According to Pryor, before migrating tape volumes that contain application data, all requests for scratch mounts should be directed to the new technology. “In this way, mainframers can prevent creating data unnecessarily on the old devices, which would only have to be migrated later,” he says. “Depending upon the number of scratch tapes created daily, it may be possible to move just a subset of the scratch tapes to the new technology first, before migrating application data, to eliminate the need to define a new scratch volume range.”
Pryor also points out, “Migrating data at the volume level, where the tape volume serial number stays the same, is the fastest and most uncomplicated migration.” Some tape volumes will be migrated, and others may remain on older devices as the migration proceeds. Pryor adds, “It is important to ensure that tape dataset allocation processing selects the correct device, depending on where the volume resides. This becomes particularly important if the old or new devices are not SMS managed.”
“A systematic approach to data migration should involve tools that identify data that needs to be transferred quickly and without disrupting applications or other system functions,” explains Pryor. SHARE Kansas City attendees can expect data migration to be inevitable for all installations because technology is often upgraded to improve performance, and this session will provide them with the tools and techniques for successful migrations.
Register today for SHARE Kansas City, taking place Aug. 4-8.