Robot Best Practices, Part Two

Last week we wrote about best practices for Robot/SCHEDULE, Robot/CONSOLE, and Robot/NETWORK. This week we’ll cover Robot/SAVE, Robot/REPORTS, and Robot/SPACE.

1. Always keep in mind that automation is key in our products. I still find customers who run manual backups. With Robot/SAVE, the computer should start all of your backups. It can even run restricted state saves, like SAVSYS and SAVLIB *NONSYS, with its Restricted State Utility (RSU).
2. If you have multiple partitions, run a centralized scratch pool and centralized reporting for tape integrity and consolidated reporting. Robot/SAVE Data Center Management makes this easy.
3. Robot/SAVE works with automated media loading devices—AML, ATL, Silo, virtual tape libraries, and more—to mount tapes unattended. It can load the next tape in the silo, skip volumes with active files, and catalog volumes as they’re used.

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4. It’s a really bad practice to leave spooled data (reports) on output queues as your online report data access strategy—it impacts performance, there’s a lack of security, and there’s no retention strategy. You can back up and archive output queue data many different ways, but most solutions don’t offer the archive strategy that Robot/REPORTS provides.
5. Why print an entire report when the end user only wants the last page? Robot/REPORTS makes it easy to deliver parts of a report. You can segment reports by logical page breaks and other criteria. Robot/REPORTS even has a bursting table that lets you segment by two different criteria on each page. You can distribute the results in multiple formats, including PDF, TXT, CSV, print, and online.
6. Robot/REPORTS OPerator Assistance Language (OPAL) is very powerful. Use it to make electronic decisions about values on the report. For example, if you need to look at a report for errors or results, Robot/REPORTS can make those decisions for you automatically.

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7. With Robot/SPACE, it’s easy to monitor QTEMP and temporary storage at the job level. Many customers are caught off guard when a job starts to consume excess amounts of disk space and they don’t know it’s happening.
8. Everyone forgets about the IFS and claim that they’re not using it. What they fail to realize is that many application vendors are using it. Robot/SPACE’s Storage Audit can “age” the IFS by selecting objects to remove based on the “last used” date of the object.
9. Collect a full system of detail from your server at least once a week, including objects, libraries, and the IFS. It’s a great benchmark for troubleshooting future areas of concern and gives you the detail you need to manage disk space growth and predict trends.

In the future, I’ll explore these products further for other “must use” areas. Next week, we’ll discuss best practices for enterprise scheduling.