CA Copycat
Media conversion via CA Copycat
And the fun started…
The big man in the corner office drops by with
the keys to a brand new VTS that will be
installed this weekend. As you do the happy
dance in your head, he barks that it needs to be
in production within 30 days as the old VTS is
coming off of maintenance and rolled out the
back door. You hit your rolodex for the Domino’s
phone number as you can see home will be a
distant memory for the next 30 days.
Using the Application Conversion approach.
There are several different methods to convert the old
VTS/ATL to the new drives. The course we are going to
follow takes the smallest application and uses it for a
benchmark and verification of the conversion. Find the
smallest application that uses tape, perhaps Accounts
Payable or Accounts Receivables, as they are normally
good candidates for this.
Finding the first victim
We have an EARL megabyte report that lists each volume, the percent of usage, and the number
of megabits used. We can change the sort order to list by DSN instead of volser.
COMPANY NAME
VOLUME SCR FILE VOL VOL
B61761
NO
1
1
1
B61765
NO
1
1
1
B64474
NO
1
1
1
MEGABYTE USAGE FOR VOLUMES
VOLUME BYTE
DATA SET
958.85
PRDAP.VMPRD97
1.24
PRDAP.VMPRD98
0.62
PRDAP.VMPRD99
Let’s take these 3 PRDAP tapes and move them over. Keep a list of the number of tapes and
megabyte totals you have in this run to get an idea of the amount of time it takes to convert the
first series. This provides a benchmark of the amount of time it takes to copy ‘X’ number of
megabytes.
Putting the Cat to work.
Let’s use one of the tapes from PRDAP.VMPRD series and execute Copycat
with the following parameters:
FILES=ALL,SAVEINFO=YES
RECATLG=PREV
INDISP=RETPD=1
OUTDISP=SAME
INUNIT=TAPE
OUTUNIT=VTAPE
SORT=NO
MERGE=NO
INPUT=*
B61761
B61765
B64474
The newly created volume has the
RETPD/EXPDT of the original volume
What’s going to happen here?
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CopyCat copies all of the files on this tape and saves all of the old
information from the VMF into the new volume.
All of the DSN’s that were copied are cataloged to the new output volume
(input must have been cataloged)
The INPUT volume has a RETPD of one day and will be scratched the next
time daily scratch and movement runs.
The newly created volume has the RETPD/EXPDT of the original volume.
INUNIT is the input unit and OUTUNIT is the output unit.
SORT=NO tells Copycat not to sort the output tape upon creation.
INPUT is the volser we want to copy.
Before changing your Facebook status to ‘HERO’
Let’s double-check our work:
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The OS Catalog should show the new volume listed as cataloged. Input
volume should be un-cataloged.
The input volume should have an EXPDT/RETPD of tomorrow’s date.
The output volume should have the original retention and all the information
should match the former input volume.
Write down the number of volumes/megabytes/time for the conversion of
the first run. You now have a rough idea about how long it’s going to take to
run the full conversion.
Update the production JCL/SMS
Now that we have copied the tapes over to the new
drives, we need to make sure that tonight’s batch is not
going to create any volumes on the old drives.
Are we there yet?
In a perfect world, Operations would give you all of their tape drives for a
week and you could run non-stop until every tape was copied.
Unfortunately, this little thing called nightly batch gets in the way. Try and
start up the conversion after your onlines are up in the morning and run until
nightly batch starts back up. You can knock out a lot of copies from
Saturday morning thru Monday evening. To keep this conversion running at
all available times, try and get this into a scheduling package. Now that you
have an idea about the runtimes, set up the jobs ahead of time and submit
them to finish up within the allocated window. Check the output and correct
the warning or errors of any jobs that finish with a return code of 4 or higher.
You can run as many Copycat jobs concurrently as you want.
There yet? Cont.
Understanding every shop is unique. Your best copy window may be on a
different timeframe. One way to keep track of the conversion is to run the
CA TLMS master DSN list and select only the volumes created on the older
drives. We will sort by DSN and create date on this report. This is list of
volumes that still need to be copied by Copycat. This list should get smaller
as more tapes are converted off of the older drives. Once this report is
empty, you are indeed done. You can prevent the former input volumes
from being re-used by taking the volumes out-of-service in CA TLMS . One
thing to remember is that Copycat uses very little CPU resources during a
conversion.
Updates to TLMS (TLERPT04)
Current:
REPORT
TITLE 0 &COMPANY_NAME
@58 ‘ACTIVE DATA SETS ‘
@112 ‘TLERPT04’ 2 ‘PAGE ‘ PAGENUMBER
TITLE @1 ‘CA TLMS ‘
@9 &RELNO &GENLEVEL
@112 DATEOFREPORT 3 TIMEOFREPORT
CONTROL DSN
PRINT DSN FILESEQ VOLSER SCRATCH_IND 5 CDATE CTIME CJOB 3 LDATE
LJOB
END
Updates to TLMS (TLERPT04) Cont.
Change to:
REPORT
TITLE 0 &COMPANY_NAME
@58 ‘ACTIVE DATA SETS by drives 680-780’
@112 ‘TLERPT04’ 2 ‘PAGE ‘ PAGENUMBER
TITLE @1 ‘CA TLMS ‘
@9 &RELNO &GENLEVEL
@112 DATEOFREPORT 3 TIMEOFREPORT
SELECT CUNIT > ‘680’ OR CUNIT < ‘780’
CONTROL DSN CDATE CUNIT
PRINT DSN CUNIT VOLSER CDATE CJOB LDATE LUNIT
END
This checks for all volumes created on drives 680 thru 780. Modify the (680-780) to the old drives
address.
Using the Old Maid Approach
This method is great for easy kills of volumes. What we are looking for are
volumes that haven’t been used for input for 5-6 years or created and never
used again. If time permits in the conversions, see if some of these volumes
are still needed! Print off a master list and see how many of these volumes
are not being used and just scratch the volumes. Once upon a time, the
secret of EXPDT =99365 in your JCL was discovered by the application
people and everyone held their tapes forever. You can report on volumes by
EXPDT and see how many volumes fall into this category. Scratch these
volumes or ask for justification as to why they need to be held as
permanent.
Hit List
How many Y2K volumes are still hanging around? If you have to keep
them, convert these first. You would be surprised how many volumes you
get out the way. Here’s a checklist of the kinds of tapes to hit first.
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Y2K volumes
Use of EXPDT=99365
Application no longer being used
Last used for x number of years
Created x number of years and not used for input again
Another good candidate is small or severely underutilized tape volumes.
Those copy very quickly and free a lot of tapes in a hurry.
Updates to TLMS (TLERPT04)
Current:
REPORT
TITLE 0 &COMPANY_NAME
@58 ‘ACTIVE DATA SETS ‘
@112 ‘TLERPT04’ 2 ‘PAGE ‘ PAGENUMBER
TITLE @1 ‘CA TLMS ‘
@9 &RELNO &GENLEVEL
@112 DATEOFREPORT 3 TIMEOFREPORT
CONTROL DSN
PRINT DSN FILESEQ VOLSER SCRATCH_IND 5 CDATE CTIME CJOB 3 LDATE LJOB
END
TLERPT04 Cont.
Change to:
REPORT
TITLE 0 &COMPANY_NAME
@58 ‘ACTIVE DATA SETS by last used dates’
@112 ‘TLERPT04’ 2 ‘PAGE ‘ PAGENUMBER
TITLE @1 ‘CA TLMS ‘
@9 &RELNO &GENLEVEL
@112 DATEOFREPORT 3 TIMEOFREPORT
CONTROL LDATE CDATE VOLSER
PRINT DSN VOLSER LDATE CDATE CJOB
END
Showing DFHSM the New House
Some users have reported DFHSM RECALLs taking seconds instead of
minutes with many of the new V-Tape systems. One of the first things you
may want to do is reroute all of the new DFHSM backups to the new VTS.
This provides you with a decent benchmark on the new drives, and less to
convert over. One method of getting the older DFHSM backups to the new
drives is to RECYCLE them over. Start with a small percentage on the
RECYCLEs and increase the percentage. The advantage of this method
pays off later when you have fewer volumes being used by DFHSM due to
the consolidation.
Filecopy vs. Tapecopy
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Tapecopy. The real function of Tapecopy is a media replacement utility.
Tapecopy copies from the header label to the EOV marker. It does not
update the VMF. If you have a physical tape that needs replacing,
Tapecopy is the utility you need. For this migration Tapecopy is not what
you want to use.
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Filecopy. You will use this feature 99% of the time. It performs all of the data
movement and re-cataloging features that you need. Filecopy reads the
VMF to obtain the information to the newly created volume. For this reason,
non-TLMS tapes cannot be used for Copycat.