Configuring Your Product › Tailoring and Other Considerations › Archive/Backup Considerations › Archiving to Disk: Requirements and Recommendations

Archiving to Disk: Requirements and Recommendations

Traditionally, backup and archive copies of data sets have been directed to tape. CA Disk also provides the option of writing backup and archive data sets to disk. Using disk devices rather than tape or cartridge units for archive data sets eliminates the need for an operator to mount a tape when the backup or archive task is performed or when restoring data. This is particularly attractive for users implementing the auto-restore capability of CA Disk.

Note: When archiving to disk, you should consider activating software compression to save on DASD space. To activate software compression, see the sysparm description of DCDATASPn in the chapter "Sysparms."

The following summary outlines the steps necessary to implement archival to disk. Where necessary, an expanded explanation is provided for some of the summary items.

1. Specify archival to disk by one of the following methods:
   • If your ARCHIVE and DMS JCL procedures do not contain //ARCHIVE0 or //ARCHIVEC DD statements, specify sysparm ARC0TYPE with a value of DISK for the primary, and/or ARCCTYPE with a value of DISK for the copy, to allocate them dynamically.
   • Supply JCL statements for the previous ddnames that causes allocation to any disk device. CA Disk deallocates and then allocates the device as needed to perform the archive. For example, the following DD statement activates archival to disk for the primary copy:

     //ARCHIVE0 DD UNIT=3380,VOL=SER=anyvol,DISP=SHR
     

2. Specify the base name for the disk archive data sets using the following sysparms. CA Disk appends a unique name to the end of the base name, based on the current date and time.

   ARC0NAME—for the name of the primary
   ARCCNAME—for the name of the copy
   

3. Map the names you gave previously to proper disk pools (members in your PARMLIB data set) from which target volumes are selected. This mapping is specified with entries in member POOLDEFS of the PARMLIB data set. The general form of the entries is:

   'VOLU3380 DMS/'
   

4. Place target volumes in your defined pools by creating the PARMLIB member by the same name as your pool, in this case "VOLU3380", and inserting statements such as:

   VOL=(vol001,vol002,vol/)
   

5. Specify an expiration date using sysparm DYNEXPDT, or by JCL. CA Disk assigns the default expiration date of 99365 if none is specified.

   For more information, see the section Year 2000 Considerations in the User Guide.

6. Determine if the default values blocksize is appropriate. If not, override the default with the sysparm ARCDSKBZ.
7. Determine if the default manner of calculating primary and secondary space allocation is appropriate. If not, override the default by specifying sysparms:

   SPACEPRImmm—megabytes to allocate for primary
   SPACESECmmm—megabytes to allocate for secondary
   

8. Determine if default values for index maintenance, merge and rebuild functions are appropriate, and if not, specify sysparm to override the defaults.
9. Exclude Disk ARCHVOLS from CA Allocate EOV processing or any other product designed to add a new DASD volume to an allocation to avoid x37 type abends.