Simplifying migration from Broadcom CA-DISK to Model9 Cloud Data Platform

Introducing the CA-DISK to Model9 migration tool

Companies are turning to Model9 to modernize their mainframe storage and data management infrastructure, making it an integral part of their rapidly evolving hybrid multi-cloud environment. While most companies aspire to make the change as quickly as possible, they are often delayed by concerns regarding the time, effort and risks involved in such a process of change.

There are two popular approaches to backups in the mainframe storage management world:

1. The Centralized Approach: Running a centralized backup cycle at a certain time of day, typically right before or at the end of the batch window, based on a centralized system-wide backup policy. The policy is often defined by the system or storage management group, and is either defined by SMS constructs or as rules in the backup software.
2. The Decentralized Approach: In this approach, each application administrator is responsible for backing up and recovering their application data independently. Typically, backup job steps are intertwined with the application job streams backing up the data at the right timing. This process allows the application to recover to a known point in time. In large organizations, this approach can lead to hundreds and sometimes thousands of different backup jobs scattered across different applications.

Model9 Cloud Data Platform for Mainframe supports both backup approaches. Based on our experience working with mainframe customers, we have observed that most customers running IBM DFSMShsm backup software adopted a centralized backup approach while Broadcom CA-DISK customers adopted the decentralized approach. 

As a result, we often hear concerns from CA-DISK customers about having to change a large number of backup jobs owned by various application teams. WIth mainframe skills being a rare commodity, customers don’t have the time to change potentially thousands of JCL scripts as they move from CA-DISK backup commands to Model9 commands.

To help our customers with these challenges, we developed the CA-DISK to Model9 migration tool.

The CA-DISK to Model9 migration tool performs two functions:

1. Mapping all jobs using CA-DISK to backup data sets, based on an analysis of the customer’s TMC database.
2. Automatically converting CA-DISK backup JCL to Model9 Cloud Data Platform JCL. The conversion is performed according to the specific CA-DISK commands in the JCL.

The following are two examples of the tool’s capabilities.

Example 1 – Converting CA-Disk SCAN JCL

The following JCL uses the CA-DISK SCAN function to locate all changed data sets on a set of volume name patterns, backs up the data sets and sets a retention period of 8 days for the backups.

After conversion, the JCL would look as follows:

Example 2 – Converting CA-DISK Backup data sets by name JCL

The following JCL uses the CA-DISK SELECT function to back up specific data sets by name, and set a retention period of 8 days for the backups.

After conversion, the JCL would look as follows:

Summary

As demonstrated by the two examples above, the new migration tool automates an otherwise manual and cumbersome JCL conversion process allowing customers to accelerate their migration schedule and hence capitalize on TCO and efficiency gains sooner.

About the author

Gil Peleg | CEO

Gil has over two decades of hands-on experience in mainframe system programming and data management, as well as a deep understanding of methods of operation, components, and diagnostic tools. Gil previously worked at IBM in the US and in Israel in mainframe storage development and data management practices as well as at Infinidat and XIV. He is the co-author of eight IBM Redbooks on z/OS implementation.