Running Concurrent Saves in Robot/SAVE

Did you know that you can run several Robot/SAVE backup jobs concurrently? This is a great option, especially if you are also struggling with the demands of the "ever-shrinking backup window."

The approach does require some thought and planning, but it is achievable. What is required to get there?

First, you need to have more than one save device available. If you have virtual tape devices available, great! If not, then you may want to check out this article.

Secondly, you’ll need to define separate Backup Classes and Backup Sets. As you may already know, Robot/SAVE will not allow two Sets within the same Backup Class to run at the same time. Who hasn’t tried and then received the infamous "Backup/Restore for the same class are being performed by another user" warning message? This is where your thought and planning comes into play.

Now you need to split up the objects you want to save (libraries and IFS Groups*) into smaller chunks independent of each other. You may need to ask your applications team for advice on how the objects can be split up.

In our example, where our complete run time used to be approximately 3 hours, 55 minutes, we have cut it down to 2 hours, 10 minutes, with TAP01 finishing after 1 hour, 45 minutes. If we had virtual devices available, we could divide up the backup even further, cutting down on the time even more!

Obviously in our example we had to control the job flow. Below you’ll find an example of the job setup in Robot/SCHEDULE, the Reactivity (job dependencies) features allowed us to make sure none of the night processing jobs started until all of the backup jobs completed normally.

In our example, we also wanted the OPS team to be notified automatically if the backup job terminates or if it has a tape- or device-related message. To do this, assign a Robot/ALERT device on the Robot/SCHEDULE job and on the Robot/SAVE backup set.

The Robot/SAVE RBSSAVE command for executing CLASS_A, SET_A1:

*IFS Groups are a new feature in Robot/SAVE 12.