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Partner TechTip: A Centralized Scratch Pool Is a Necessity

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Trying to find a reliable, centralized tape-management solution?

 

Does your IBM i tape-tracking solution handle your tape-management needs? Are you satisfied with the tape integrity across your partitions? Could your operators write over volumes that contain active data? Are you happy with the reliability of your solution and its reporting capabilities? Can you provide a single report for your off-site storage vendor, documenting all of the volumes that are arriving to and leaving from the data center during the current business day? Does your solution work with your automated backup solution?

 

Managing tape volumes across multiple IBM i servers is challenging for any operations team. You can have issues with logging, volume tracking, and volume mounting. One fear is that an operator will overwrite a volume containing active files. Then, there's the problem of consolidating report information from multiple logs for your off-site storage location. And you must make sure you can report to the auditors when they ask you about your server restoration. Did you track who did it?

 

Robot/SAVE has helped customers for years by offering Data Center Management—a centralized scratch pool, reporting, and tape integrity solution for an IBM i environment with multiple partitions. Without such a solution, it's only a matter of time before you miss or misplace a backup or overwrite a tape. Robot/SAVE provides tape integrity across your entire network. Your team can't mount a volume from one partition on another partition because Robot/SAVE won't let it happen!

 

Robot/SAVE's centralized scratch pool works across all of your partitions. Your operators (or media loading devices) don't need to think: Robot/SAVE indicates which volumes are available across the partitions.

 

070111HelpFig1l 

Figure 1: View a centralized scratch pool of tapes, shared across partitions. (Click images to enlarge.)

 

Robot/SAVE provides a history area of backups that shows you the success and failure of backups. You can view history logs and job logs. And, if you ever need to restart a save, Robot/SAVE lets you restart saves at the last spot (very handy for SAVLIB *NONSYS and other long saves).

 

Robot/SAVE can send its statuses to Robot/NETWORK, the centralized monitoring tool. Figure 2 shows how the Robot/NETWORK display consolidates backup and recovery monitoring for an entire network of IBM i servers.

 

070111HelpFig2 

Figure 2: Robot/NETWORK consolidates Robot/SAVE backup events from all of your partitions.

Robot/SAVE Eliminates Headaches

If you're tired of inadequate solutions that claim they provide network support but don't, it's time to give your operations team a tool they can rely on. Call for your Robot/SAVE 30-day free trial. You won't be disappointed! Learn more about Robot/SAVE by clicking here. And check out Help/Systems' other offerings in the MC Showcase Buyer's Guide.

as/400, os/400, iseries, system i, i5/os, ibm i, power systems, 6.1, 7.1, V7, V6R1

TOM HUNTINGTON

Tom Huntington is Executive Vice President of Technical Solutions at HelpSystems, and has been with the company for nearly 30 years. He works with business alliances, acquisitions and large customer relationships and ensures that the HelpSystems software works with other major software and hardware vendors worldwide.

Tom often speaks on enterprise scheduling, security, automation topics, IBM i technology, and the HelpSystems products, and hosts technical presentations on a variety of automation topics. He is the author of the HelpSystems IBM i Marketplace Survey and has written articles on automated operations, security, cloud computing, and business intelligence for leading trade journals and newsletters. He was named an IBM Champion in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020 for over three decades of advocation and thought leadership on the IBM i platform.

Contact Tom at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..


 

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