Data Strategies Completes VTS Data Migration

Data Strategies Interchange today announced that it has successfully completed a large VTS data migration project for a leading health insurance provider company. As part of a servers consolidation project, our customer wanted to replace its IBM VTS with a tape-less solution based on EMC storage subsystems (Clariion and Centera) and BusTech’s mainframe appliances for storage (MAS).

Data Strategies developed a process to perform the off-line migration of the virtual volumes stored on stacked VTS tapes to MAS managed storage (e.g. Clariion). This process involves the extraction and decompression of virtual volumes from VTS tapes followed by their conversion to the BusTech’s AWS virtual volume format. Serial numbers of the original volumes are remapped to new serial number ranges, in accordance with specified rules, and the ‘migration database’ initially loaded with information extracted from the tape management system in use, is updated.

Before starting the migration process, the allocation of scratch volumes is diverted from the VTS pool to the new storage in order to bring the VTS to a ‘quiet’ state (with the exception of the virtual volumes to which data is appended). During the migration process the ‘migration database’ is synchronized with the tape management system database and at the end with the Catalog. The last step of the process, performed over a half-day period with no production jobs running, performs the updating of the tape management system database and the catalog using the JCL data created by Data Strategies’ software from the data stored in the ‘migration database’.

The most significant benefit of using Data Strategies’ off-line VTS data migration approach for this project is that it made possible to migrate over 15 Terabytes of VTS data with virtually no impact on ongoing production work and without using customer’s resources.

Further information about DSI’s document archive migration services can be found here.