Non-disruptive data migration

As data availability demands increase, there is a need to also control costs. The following paragraphs describe how z/OS®-based TDMF supports the requirements for non-disruptive data migration.

As data storage capacity requirements grow rapidly, data availability demands increase. At the same time, there is a need to control costs. Data center management faces a dilemma; the introduction of new storage technology is traditionally disruptive. This dilemma conflicts with the need to ensure a maximum availability of the data.

What is needed is a tool that allows the customer to non-disruptively relocate or migrate data within the data center, in periods of full production and demand.

Here, the issues of data movement or migration are discussed. Decades ago, IBM® Corporation’s technical advisory group (GUIDE) published the requirements and capabilities of efficiently managing and maintaining storage in a modern large data center. In the interim, IBM Transparent Data Migration Facility for z⁠/⁠OS and third-party vendors created a standard set of tools to allow data to be copied, archived, and restored automatically. Through time, improvements in the areas of performance, usability, and data availability evolved.

The problem remains that the abilities of existing data migration tools do not keep pace with the requirements of today’s data centers. A site’s storage administrator must be able to support continuous around-the-clock data availability. Although other vendors developed migration techniques, their implementations are based on the vendors’ hardware capabilities.