There are a few vendor products out there on the market that could help you with "offloading" production joblogs and reports. They are generally called "SYSOUT archivers" and can take what you are doing (and even Lizette's suggestion) to a higher level. One product that I have worked with in the past was "CA-VIEW". Yes, it may be expensive, but ... - it archives joblogs and reports to a disk database - it allows for easy on-line viewing (using an ISPF appl.) and reprinting of archived reports - it uses tape for backing up the archived reports and manages the backup tapes intelligently, filling them to capacity (that was one of your concerns, wasn't it?) - it automatically releases expired tapes for scratch - it has features to define archive retention period on disk and on tape globally and optionally by certain selection criteria (e.g., all joblogs: 60 days, production reports (by ID): 365 days or as needed)
You might want to take a closer look at these SYSOUT archiver products. Your other concern was the JES2 job number limit of 9,999. That has not been a hard limit anymore for many years. Unless you are running a very old, unsupported version of MVS, you can easily change to at least 99,999 or the max. of 999,999. Please see the JOBDEF RANGE= parameter in http://publibz.boulder.ibm.com/cgi-bin/bookmgr_OS390/BOOKS/has2a4a0/3.28.2?S HELF=EZ2ZBK0K&DT=20100630134619&CASE= for more information. Regards, Ulrich Krueger -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Bruce Richardson Sent: Thursday, February 23, 2012 10:52 AM To: [email protected] Subject: JES2 OFFLOAD - requesting help, ideas, etc. Hello IBM-MAIN people, We recently have installed a new IBM Tape Library (without a VTS) to replace a very old STK Silo; so we are migrating our tape usage from 3490's to 3590's - about a hundred-fold increase increase in capacity per cartridge (and will have many fewer cartridges!)! This change in technology has forced us to change all of our tape jobs - in some cases, like backups, it is very straight forward (take 40 odd jobs, create one job that "stacks" all of backups onto a single tape); some jobs/processes are not so easy! One of our difficult processes is the JES2 OFFLOAD. Every weekday night (at 18:30) we start the offload of production output to tape (with PURGE). Before the new tape library, this would take less than a full 3490 cartridge (and it still takes less than a full 3590 cartridge - a very small fraction of a cartridge and a lot of waste). From my reading of the JES2 commands, it seems that JES2 OFFLOAD can not deal with file sequence numbers (more than one file per tape). Currently, we keep the offload on tape for 60 days. I would like to get some feedback from others on the list as to what they do for JES2 OFFLOAD. Is anyone using the OFFS= parameters in commands, and how (I would like to see command sequences). One of the questions I have is, can JES2 append to an existing OFFLOAD tape? I would like to be able to mount the same tape for month (roughly 20 working days). I know that as job numbers roll over 9999 to 1 I might get into the slim possiblity of JOBNUM/JOBNAME conflicts on restoring the output. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
