About Save Set Manager for OpenVMS Version V1.7

[Lionel Liu]

Hello there

We are doing some investigateion about HP product Save Set Mananger for OpenVMS v1.7
for future purchase.

We had gone through the SPD about the product. it says

The key benefits of Save Set Manager for OpenVMS
are:
• Reduction of operational time spent on online backup
and restore without compromising data integrity
• Selective manipulation of save set contents and attributes
• Transfer of backup save sets between tape drive
technologies
• Transfer of backup save sets from one tape or disk
drive to another tape or disk drive while maintaining
data integrity features
• Reduced down time for a BACKUP/RESTORE operation
• Ability to monitor degradation of archived save sets
• Wildcard support
• Backup journal file creation
• Multiple output copies on merge and copy

It is hard to understand what those function would be. Anybody used the product before? Is there somebody can give us some detail examples. Or if we could request some kind of Demo for this product from HP?

Thanks ver

[Ian Miller.]

you may be able to get a loan licence for a limited period (e.g 30 days) so you can try out the product. Contact hp or your hp reseller.

What are you thinking of using SSM for?

[Robert_Boyd · Accepted solution]

I worked with SSM for a few years.

At a site I worked at in the past we used SSM to make duplicate copies of backup tapes created by ABS. We sent one set offsite for disaster recovery purposes and kept the other set onsite for quick restores of individual files/directories as needed. This saved time and cpu resources because the SSM copy was much more efficient than rescanning the disk drives to generate a 2nd set of backup tapes.

The job that copied the tapes was essentially a background process. It also had the advantage of being able to combine the most recently created savesets from several different tapes onto a single tape or volumeset of tapes. The job that I designed to copy the savesets selected the most recent full backup savesets and the most recent incremental savesets and copied them in an order that optimized the access to the input tapes so that the copying could be done in a single pass.

SSM can be used to "refresh" old backups by copying savesets from an old tape to a new one.

SSM also makes it possible to easily combine savesets from several old low density media onto a single newer high density medium.

There are many other potential uses. These are some that I have personally used it for in the past.

Robert

[Anton van Ruitenbeek]

Hi,

Robert, you mentioned to use this product to copy savesets from tape to tape. How does it work with savesets which are over more then one tape ?
We have a multi-site environment and backuping on one site. The data is (also as the machines) over two sites. So actualy for disaster we do not need this option. But I want to copy the content of a tape to another location. We reduced the blocksize to 32535 so we can copy from MK to MK but the problem we have is when a saveset is continueing on the next tape.

AvR

[Robert_Boyd]

Anton,

SaveSet Manager works quite well copying from savesets that span multiple volumes whether they are on tape or disk. I have plenty of experience working with that feature. Also, saveset manager correctly handles spanning to multiple output volumes. It properly performs the same operations that BACKUP does when continuing writing a saveset across a volume boundary. There were some issues that came up with SSM several years ago related to this, but they resolved those 3 or 4 years ago as I recall.

In my experience it is quite handy for manipulating savesets of all forms.

Proost,

Robert