The customer is a large managed-services company with two main data centres near Toronto, Canada.
Migrate to Virtual Tape
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 managed-services company with two main data centres near Toronto, Canada. Their main customer is a large bank, and more recently the portfolio has expanded and there are additional data centres.
Each data center operates multiple large z/OS mainframes. Virtual tape systems are StorageTek (now Oracle) VSM, while the tape management system is CA 1.
Customer Need
More than 100,000 physical 3490 tape cartridges must be moved to the new virtual tape system. An automated, easy-to-use solution is needed to migrate non-disruptively while co-existing 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. 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. The project manager can analyze TelTape statistics in an exported spreadsheet.
TelTape Delivered
The customer chose TelTape to migrate their tapes to virtual. Security administration was pleasantly surprised that APF authorization was not needed. During the main migration, 10 TelTape migration jobs of 200 tapes each were executed concurrently on each z/OS system. Performance staff analyzed the TelTape workload, and had no concerns about CPU consumption by TelTape. Storage administration was happy that old tapes were automatically expired after a specified grace period.
TelTape Continues to Deliver
By choosing to purchase licenses for TelTape, the product continues to be available for new customer projects, and also for ad hoc tape copying as needs arise. Annual maintenance is a very affordable option they have continued to choose for 7 years now. Asset management is pleased that software costs are contained, because TelTape cost does not increase with CPU model upgrades.