DFSMSdss storage administration

Operations personnel must routinely perform maintenance operations such as copying, reorganizing, cataloging, and scratching data. To perform these operations on RACF-protected resources, they need RACF® authorization. Two methods of providing this authorization are:

Giving the user the OPERATIONS or group-OPERATIONS attribute
Defining profiles for volumes in the DASDVOL class and authorizing the user to access the volumes

Both of these methods have certain drawbacks. For example, the OPERATIONS or group-OPERATIONS attribute might give the user more authority to look at individual data sets than you would like. Defining DASDVOL profiles might require more administrative overhead than you would like and, in addition, does not allow a user to work with SMS-managed volumes.

If you use DFSMSdss, there is a third method you can use. You can define special FACILITY class profiles that let a user act as a DFSMSdss storage administrator. Once the profiles and permissions are set up, the user obtains authorization to the required volumes by specifying the ADMINISTRATOR option on the appropriate DFSMSdss command.

DFSMSdss storage administration is more flexible and requires less administrative work to maintain. For complete details on how to set up and use the support, see z/OS DFSMSdss Storage Administration.