In the old way, with SCSI attached 3590's you only had to either manually
mount your mksysb tape in an attached drive OR use another host defined to
the atl to mount the mksysb tape to a drive attached to the host you were
wanting to restore.  (I always have a ~utility server~ defined to all my
atl's to run mtlib commands from, for just such instances.)  That all works
wonderfully.  You can automate the mksysb process and just the other day, I
actually had to use one of these tapes to rebuild our test environment.

With fiber attached drives, I can't say yet... we are looking at moving
over to fiber attached 3592's over the next two months and I haven't looked
into if a fiber attached drive can be used as a bootable device yet.

I'll try to remember to post our results on being able to use a fiber
attached 3592 as a bootable device.  I would say that would be a waste of a
300 GB tape but if your system is down hard and you need to recover...
OH, now I just thought... during a boot from a mksysb tape, does the system
go through any sort of tape relocation or does it just start at the ~load
point~ ?
One could place multiple mksysb images on a single tape IF processing just
initiated where the tape is positioned... between mtlib & tapeutil one
could mount any tape and position it anywhere so if you had 4 or 5 boxes
using an atl, they might be able to share a single tape.... (ugh...  more
work to research that...)

Dwight E. Cook
Systems Management Integration Professional, Advanced
Integrated Storage Management
TSM Administration
(918) 925-8045



                                                                       
                      Thomas Denier                                    
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We are considering migrating our TSM system to an AIX system with 3590
tape drives in a 3494 tape library. The drives would be connected using
FCP (Fibre Channel Protocol). The host would be a pSeries system. We are
currently leaning toward a p650.

Given this configuration, would it be possible to restore AIX using
3590 mksysb tapes? If so, would it done by booting from tape or by
booting from CD and telling the software to read a mksysb tape? How
would we deal with the library? In particular, would we have to use
the stand-alone tape feature of the library?