CA Copycat

1. CA Copycat Media conversion via CA Copycat

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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. C O M P A N Y N A M E MEGABYTE USAGE FOR VOLUMES VOLUME SCR FILE VOL VOL VOLUME BYTE DATA SET B61761 NO 1 1 1 958.85 PRDAP.VMPRD97 B61765 NO 1 1 1 1.24 PRDAP.VMPRD98 B64474 NO 1 1 1 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.

5. 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

6. What’s going to happen here? • 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.

7. Before changing your Facebook status to ‘HERO’ Let’s double-check our work: • 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.

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. 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.

11. 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

12. 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.

13. 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.

14. 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. • 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.

15. 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

16. 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

17. 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.

18. Filecopy vs. Tapecopy • 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. • 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.