moving 3592 tape from 3494 into 3584

[mrtturbo]

Hi,
Migrating off 3494 onto 3584. Brainstorming how to move current inventory of tape media. Do we migrate with tape to tape copy or can we just pop in the old tapes into the new library. 3494 uses 1120-E05 drive while 3584 uses 1130-E06 drive. E06 should be able to read the media? Any thoughts?

[moon-buddy]

Hi,
Migrating off 3494 onto 3584. Brainstorming how to move current inventory of tape media. Do we migrate with tape to tape copy or can we just pop in the old tapes into the new library. 3494 uses 1120-E05 drive while 3584 uses 1130-E06 drive. E06 should be able to read the media? Any thoughts?

Search the forum - there are many posts about this.

Essentially, just pop-in the E05 and the E06 drives knows.

[mrtturbo]

Thx for the reply. I had been hunting around and I think you did a similiar move...3494 into 3584. We originally thought our migration would have to be 2 part since we want to move existing E05 drives in our 3494 into the 3584 and upgrade them to E06. We thought we would have to move the drives in stages so there would be some left in the 3494 to complete tape to tape copy over to the 3584...but from reading it appears that we could move all our desired drives at once and upgrade them, since the E06 drives can read the old E05 JA/JB tapes. We then mark all the E05 tapes read only, take them out, put them in 3584, update all of the stgpools/mgmtclasses to use the new library/devclass (writing all new data to E06 media) and let the old JA/JB media expire (while it could be read by the E06 drives if need be). After the old media expires we could then remove it from the 3584. Does that sound about right?
Thanks again for the reply/help!

[moon-buddy]

Thx for the reply. I had been hunting around and I think you did a similiar move...3494 into 3584. We originally thought our migration would have to be 2 part since we want to move existing E05 drives in our 3494 into the 3584 and upgrade them to E06. We thought we would have to move the drives in stages so there would be some left in the 3494 to complete tape to tape copy over to the 3584...but from reading it appears that we could move all our desired drives at once and upgrade them, since the E06 drives can read the old E05 JA/JB tapes. We then mark all the E05 tapes read only, take them out, put them in 3584, update all of the stgpools/mgmtclasses to use the new library/devclass (writing all new data to E06 media) and let the old JA/JB media expire (while it could be read by the E06 drives if need be). After the old media expires we could then remove it from the 3584. Does that sound about right?
Thanks again for the reply/help!

Essentially what you said is correct except:

1. The 3592 tapes that were from the E05 needs to be marked as RO when moving to a 3584 E06 library.
2. Once the E05 tapes have expired or moved manually to E06 format, the 'empty' E05 tapes can be used on the E06 drives as scratch. Thus, no tapes are thrown out.

This is essentially what I did.

[mrtturbo]

Thx. We would also have JA tape media from J1A drives in addtion to the JB E05 media coming over. I would assume the process would be the same for reading tape except we will not want to retain the expired carts since the E06 cannot write down to the J1A level, correct?
Can you think of any reason (TSM related) this would not work? I ask because for some time we reasoned we would need to come up with a staggered migration plan for the data...this seems almost too easy.

[moon-buddy]

I think you are getting confused.

E06 drives can use the 3592 tapes that you have written using J1A (first generation) format BUT the old J1A formated tapes will be written in E06 format when data has expired, or moved. You even don't need to format the old, empty, and scratched J1A-formatted tapes. The E06 format will be imposed on these tapes once TSM knows that these are scratched.

The same is true with your E05 tapes.

Just make sure that when defining the devclass for the E06 tape drive, the parameter format=drive is set.

This is one big advantage of 3592 format VS LTO.