Skip to Main Content
IBM Power Ideas Portal


This portal is to open public enhancement requests against IBM Power Systems products, including IBM i. To view all of your ideas submitted to IBM, create and manage groups of Ideas, or create an idea explicitly set to be either visible by all (public) or visible only to you and IBM (private), use the IBM Unified Ideas Portal (https://ideas.ibm.com).


Shape the future of IBM!

We invite you to shape the future of IBM, including product roadmaps, by submitting ideas that matter to you the most. Here's how it works:

Search existing ideas

Start by searching and reviewing ideas and requests to enhance a product or service. Take a look at ideas others have posted, and add a comment, vote, or subscribe to updates on them if they matter to you. If you can't find what you are looking for,

Post your ideas
  1. Post an idea.

  2. Get feedback from the IBM team and other customers to refine your idea.

  3. Follow the idea through the IBM Ideas process.


Specific links you will want to bookmark for future use

Welcome to the IBM Ideas Portal (https://www.ibm.com/ideas) - Use this site to find out additional information and details about the IBM Ideas process and statuses.

IBM Unified Ideas Portal (https://ideas.ibm.com) - Use this site to view all of your ideas, create new ideas for any IBM product, or search for ideas across all of IBM.

ideasibm@us.ibm.com - Use this email to suggest enhancements to the Ideas process or request help from IBM for submitting your Ideas.

Status Future consideration
Workspace IBM i
Categories Save and Restore
Created by Guest
Created on Mar 9, 2018

increase speed on DUPTAP and DUPMEDBRM positioning

Increase positioning speed during DUPTAP / DUPMEDBRM or change behavior of how it is done.
Currently on each duplication operation the cartridge is rewound and drive reads from beginning every sequence until it reaches the desired seq. number to be duplicated. IBM support analysed this issue and I was told that it takes about 1 sec. for every sequence number read.


Use Case:

Currently size of tape cartridges is increasing steadily and customers want to make use of if. So customers with 2 locations / tape libraries or drives use SAVE with append function to store more data on each cartridge and then duplicate it onto another cartridge to be save in case of cartridge fault and location outage.
So on smaller systems where only a few hundred GB are saved to tape a lot of seq. numbers are stored and it can take hours and hours to position correctly. Afterwards the tape duplication itself is done pretty fast.


Idea priority High
  • Guest
    Reply
    |
    Mar 19, 2021

    If you have enough space on any ASP you can make backup into SAVF and subsequently 2 copies into tapes from this SAVF. It's little bit complicated to set it up in BRMS. But it work pretty well.

  • Guest
    Reply
    |
    Jun 25, 2020

    See Support Case TS003833642.

    Due to this inadequate manner of tape usage (reading the source tape) during a DUPTAP/DUPMEDBRM, a customer of our company has a media motion of 25.573 kilometers on a SINGLE LTO 7 cartridge after 2 years. You have to visualize this figure. The length is more than half of the circumference of the earth!!! In addition the cartridge has reached it's end-of-life after 2 years usage. This is first class waste of resources. In my view this circumstance is unacceptable!

    Please provide an improvement asap.

  • Guest
    Reply
    |
    Aug 30, 2019

    I totally disagree to below recommendation!

    There are a lot of customer that cannot afford a virtual tape library solution - and as far as I know IBM stopped support for their own VTL solution and only promotes a third party solution.
    A lot of our customers have 2 locations and already 2 tape libraries, and to give you a feeling:
    Complete backup to tape on one of our customer systems currently takes ~ 22 MINUTES, but tape duplication takes 1 HOUR AND 39 MINUTES!

    Please prioritize this RFE!

  • Guest
    Reply
    |
    Aug 13, 2019

    The CAAC has reviewed this requirement and recommends that IBM view this as a “nice to have” low priority feature. A Virtual Tape Library solution might be a better fit for this challenge; however, if there is an easy way for IBM to speed up the drive, that would also be great.

    Background: The COMMON Americas Advisory Council (CAAC) members have a broad range of experience in working with small and medium-sized IBM i customers. CAAC has a key role in working with IBM i development to help assess the value and impact of individual RFEs on the broader IBM i community, and has therefore reviewed your RFE.

    For more information about CAAC, see www.common.org/caac

    For more details about CAAC's role with RFEs, see http://www.ibmsystemsmag.com/Blogs/i-Can/May-2017/COMMON-Americas-Advisory-Council-%28CAAC%29-and-RFEs/

    Nancy Uthke-Schmucki - CAAC Program Manager

  • Guest
    Reply
    |
    Jun 21, 2019

    The tape capacity is still growing, but we have to work with cartridges in the other way also, not only use them for backups/archives/restores/retrieves.

    As it seems DUPTAP, CHKTAP, and DSPTAP commands are out of scope of practical usage with fast tape technology and more capacity together with more # of seq. of saved objects.

    Please, prioritize this issue. I think it is very usual to use DUPTAP/PUPMEDBRM commands for creation of backup copies, but now it takes long time to do copies. We are using shared tape infrastructure and it is bottleneck for us, because several drives are running long duptap jobs daily.

  • Guest
    Reply
    |
    Dec 20, 2018

    IBM will use this request as input to planning but no commitment is made or implied. This request will be updated in the future if IBM implements it. IBM will use votes and comments from others in the community to help prioritize this request.

  • Guest
    Reply
    |
    Aug 31, 2018

    Hi, are there any news on this topic? We see more and more customers experiencing problems because of too many sequences on one cartridge causing tape duplications run for a long time.

  • Guest
    Reply
    |
    Apr 18, 2018

    IBM has received the requirement and is evaluating it. IBM will provide a response after evaluation is complete.

  • Guest
    Reply
    |
    Mar 12, 2018

    Due to processing by IBM, this request was reassigned to have the following updated attributes:
    Brand - Servers and Systems Software
    Product family - Power Systems
    Product - IBM i
    Component - Save, Restore
    Operating system - IBM i
    Source - None

    For recording keeping, the previous attributes were:
    Brand - Servers and Systems Software
    Product family - Power Systems
    Product - IBM i
    Component - BRMS
    Operating system - IBM i
    Source - None

  • Guest
    Reply
    |
    Mar 11, 2018

    Hi I do not think this is BRMS. As BRMS uses the DUPTAP co.mand under the covers, DUPTAP would need to do the fast positioning and not BRMS ....