The customer is a large insurance company in Japan. They have two sites, with five IBM mainframes running 16 z/OS LPAR’s, and 1.3 million virtual volumes on Oracle VSM.
Migrate to Tapeless
TELTAPE
TelTape is an easy-to-use program product for tape copying, migration, and stacking on z/OS. TelTape has migrated millions of tapes since 1998.
Customer Description
The customer is a large insurance company in Japan. They have two sites, with five IBM mainframes running 16 z/OS LPAR’s, and 1.3 million virtual volumes on Oracle VSM. Output tape mounts are usually scratch volumes using the CA-1 tape management system, although some are “private” mounts for user-managed volumes.
Customer Need
The customer decided to change the brand of tape subsystem, and at the same time move to a newer “tapeless” solution supporting SMSTape. An affordable, automated, easy-to-use solution is needed to migrate non-disruptively while coexisting with production workload, and preserve the creation jobname, creation date (etc.) in the tape management system. Cataloged datasets must be recataloged to new volume serials, while uncatalogued datasets must remain uncataloged.
Enter TelTape
TelTape is designed to migrate tapes by the thousands, and is very affordable. TelTape is easy for the systems programmer to install and maintain, because it’s delivered in standard SMP/E format. TelTape is easy for the storage administrator to use, because it includes ISPF panels to enter selection criteria, run reports, and review results.
TelTape Delivered
The customer chose TelTape to migrate their tapes to the new subsystem. After setup by Cartagena’s local service partner, all TelTape copy operations were done by the customer. Running up to 38 migrations concurrently, they moved 8,000 to 10,000 volumes per day, and within a few months the job was completed.
Copy to Same Volume Serial
About 50,000 volumes are accessed using “private” mount, so in this case the migration process must not change the volume serials. TelTape’s COPYVOL option was used to copy data directly from non-SMS to SMSTape volumes, including those under CA-1 management. Another TelTape feature dynamically defined the SMSTape volumes, extending the availability of existing non-SMS tape data right up until the time of migration.
Cartagena Continues to Deliver
After this migration project, the customer decided to change to IBM’s DFSMSrmm tape management system. Because TelTape also supports DFSMSrmm, future projects can also be supported using TelTape.