There really is no "safe" way to share DASD without some sort of PLEX, either a full sysplex (with the CF's) or a baisc (baby) sysplex with Ficon adapters as CTC's.
Otherwise, Catalog sharing is problematic and PDS/e sharing is not possible, and actually neither is standard PDS sharing of members because multiple people can end up overlaying each other. The reserves alone that will happen in a Sandbox are probably already affecting your other LPARs and you might not even realize it. HSM backups are a good example of something that issues reserves that can slow things down for the systems that aren't doing the backups, but are using those volumes. There are many more issues, too many to list. Can you get away without some sort of Plex? The answer is, if you are careful and don't mind the ENQ's, yes, until you do something that you should not have, in which case you can have a really bad day. The best you can hope for in that situation is that you lock out the other system(s), the worst is that you end up with wrong or corrupt data. It's far too easy (and cheap) to at least set up a basic plex (with ficon ports) than to expose yourself to problems. Honestly, you can use extra Ficon ports or buy a (or a couple) ficon cards on ebay or from some third party hardware (re)seller and have them installed. Connecting things up is extremely easy and quick, plus (since GRS is free) you end up with not only safety, but the ability to route commands from any system to any other system and several other niceties. Brian ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
