Scrubbing

Why Scrub?

Scrubbing is a term used to describe the "synchronization" of a BCS with all associated DASD volumes. This process is often performed during disaster recovery. One approach to disaster recovery entails restoring a backup of the BCS, and a subset of your total DASD environment to simulate application recovery. For example, 300 DASD volumes may be related to a catalog and an application may reference 30 specific volumes. The removal of catalog entries related to the other 270 volumes that are not referenced is a process that "scrubs" or cleans the catalog of unrelated entries. This seems like quite a bit of unnecessary work that wastes valuable disaster recovery test time. Most catalog recovery products today concentrate on restoring the entire BCS, without allowing you to selectively target required entries.

The T-REX DRIMPORT command uses "Intelligent Selection" to restore catalog entries that will be used, thus eliminating "scrubbing". DRIMPORT allows you to selectively IMPORT specific records (keys), record types, and datasets residing in part or wholly on specific volumes from an AMS/E EXPORT of a BCS. The DSN, XDSN, RANGE, and XRANGE keywords are used to select BCS keys (data set names). The RECORDTYPE keyword provides additional flexibility to further select specific BCS record types (ATL, GDG, NonVSAM, VSAM, UCAT). Default processing selects all keys and BCS record types. Optionally, GDG bases can be restored as "empty" (initialized). The DEVT/XDEVT, and VOL,XVOL keywords are used to select BCS keys (data set names) that reside on specific volume(s) and/or devicetype(s). These features are sold as separate products by other vendors.

One customer has reported that they were able to eliminate three to four hours of "catalog scrubbing" during their last disaster test.

"Intelligent Selection" was been a part of T-REX since the very first release of the product, not an afterthought.