Advanced Image Copy Services

Advanced Image Copy Services provides the ability to create a Fast Recovery image copy, which recovers a database data set quickly, thus reducing total recovery time and the time that the database is unavailable.

You can activate Advanced Image Copy Services in IMS HP Image Copy function jobs that are executed with the FABJMAIN program. It is not supported for IMS HP Image Copy jobs executed with IMS compatible JCL. Advanced Image Copy Services is supported for both the batch image copy process and the concurrent image copy (CIC) process.

Benefits of activating Advanced Image Copy Services include:

• Reducing the time that the database data set is unavailable
• Reducing the time required to generate image copies
• Reducing the time required to recover a database data set

Many online databases must be available at all times. If a backup is made while the data is being updated, the backup could be unusable or could require that a log be applied to the restored version to synchronize the data. The alternative is to synchronize all parts of the database and stop all update activity during the backup.

DFSMSdss Advanced Copy Services is comprised of hardware and software services that allow you to back up a database or any collection of data at a point-in-time and with minimum downtime for the database. The database is unavailable only long enough for DFSMSdss to initialize a Concurrent Copy session for the data, which is a very small fraction of the time that the complete backup will take. The copy that is made does not include any update activity. After initialization, DFSMSdss releases all the serialization it holds on the data, informs the user that the initialization is complete so that update activity can resume, and begins reading the data. The following topics provide a brief description of each DFSMSdss Advanced Copy Services feature implemented within IMS HP Image Copy using the DFSMSdss API.

When IMS database data sets reside on EMC DASD, IMS HP Image Copy can use the EMC API to invoke TimeFinder/Clone to copy the data sets instead of using FlashCopy or SnapShot of DFSMSdss. For more information about EMC TimeFinder/Clone, see the EMC TimeFinder documentation.