Keeping Data Safe When Its at Its Greatest Risk—During Migration
November 17, 2022
As companies continue to move from mainframe infrastructures to cloud and hybrid environments, the ability to quickly and securely migrate valuable data has become an advantage over the competition. This is especially true for highly regulated organizations with extensive tape catalogs that are looking to migrate tape data to a new data center. One way to ensure data integrity and give business leaders peace of mind is to implement innovative automated solutions that mitigate risk and speed up the processes of tape management and migration.
Introducing Rocket Software Tape/Copy
Rocket Software’s Tape/Copy, part of the Rocket OpenTech suite of products simplifies the tape migration process, ensures data integrity and streamlines data stacking and sorting processes by leveraging automation. Used by the largest tape drive manufacturers in the world, Tape/Copy automates the conversion of tape data sets from any tape media or device to any other tape media or device—quickly converting old technology tape media to new, higher density media.
Once converted to the new media, the Tape/Copy software automatically copies the tape data sets for migration from the mainframe and organizes them within the new data center based on a wide range of instructions set up by the user. These customizable instructions include, but are not limited to:
- Data set name or pattern
- Expiration date
- Creation date
- Number of days idle
- Automated Tape Library (ATL)/Virtual Tape Library (VTL) location
- Data set size
The Tape/Copy technology can also be configured to automatically copy and move “idle,” unused data from a company’s data library to create space, maintain organization and ensure compliance throughout data migration and management.
Ensuring Data Integrity throughout Migration
At the end of the day, an organization’s greatest concern during migration is the security and integrity of its data. One misplaced or misused file can lead to business disruption, backtracking or regulatory infractions. Tape/Copy provides peace of mind to business leaders with Extended Specify Task Abnormal Exit (ESTAE) protection throughout the dataset conversion process to ensure that any failed operations (input/output errors, missing multi-volume datasets, etc.) do not force a manual cleanup of the catalog or tape management catalog (TMC). Tape/Copy duplicates and backs up all changes to a tape dataset so that in the case of such errors, businesses still have access to the tape in its pre-conversion status. Further, Tape/Copy creates a copy of the entire TMC from the input record to the output record to preserve important dataset information, including creation date/time and the most recent time the dataset was used.
Tape/Copy is compatible with the most popular database systems (Db2, DFSMSdss, FDR/ABR, etc.) and ATL interfaces (IBM VTS, IBM ProtecTier, Oracle VSM, etc.). The automated capabilities to copy, organize and migrate tape from an organization’s mainframe database environment to a new data system quickly and securely give business leaders peace of mind and their company a leg-up over the competition.
To learn more about Rocket Software’s Tape/Copy and how it can simplify data migration during digital transformation, as well as Rocket’s suite of OpenTech products, visit Rocket’s OpenTech page.
