The Backup Recovery and Media Services (BRMS) product provides the capability to implement fully automated backup, recovery, and media management strategy for your System i product. In release IBM i 6.1, BRMS device support was enhanced to include optical devices.

The main BRMS support difference between tape and optical is the volume identifier. Tape supports a six-character volume identifier and optical supports a thirty-two-character volume identifier. BRMS changed to support thirty-two-character volume identifier, but BRMS media inventory still requires a six-character volume identifier. If names longer than six-characters are used, BRMS requires a Volume prefix specified on the System Policy to generate a unique six-character identifier for BRMS to use in conjunction with the longer volume identifiers.

The second major difference between tape and optical support deals with volume selection. After optical media has been added to the BRMS inventory for BRMS to use, BRMS does not have an exit interface to help with media management like tape during the save operation. When BRMS saves to an optical device, BRMS volume selection adds all available volumes (up to 75) onto the save request and uses the system volume list processing. Optical does have exit interface support for initialization of volumes. With this exit interface, BRMS is able to protect active volumes in the BRMS inventory from being overwritten.

Removable Disk Cartridge (RDX) on Removable Mass Storage (RMS)

NOTES:

The Media and Storage Extensions (MSE) licensed program is not required to use optical media.
BRMS does not provide tracking of opposite side volume identifiers or double-sided volumes. Each piece of media is viewed as a single volume.
No optical support for the following BRMS functions: Dump BRMS (DMPBRM), Add Media Information to BRM (ADDMEDIBRM), Extract Media Information (EXTMEDIBRM), Print Media Exceptions for BRM (PRTMEDBRM), and no reclaim support.
Only one Device (DEV) parameter can be specified. Optical support does not support cascading or parallel processing.
Optical media libraries cannot be shared between systems in a BRMS network.
The media policy option to ‘Mark history for duplication’ is restricted to *NO. BRMS does not allow duplication of optical history items.
Duplicate media using BRM (DUPMEDBRM) uses the DUPOPT command . See the restrictions on the DUPOPT command.
Optical does not support remote duplication. Duplicate media using BRM (DUPMEDBRM) values for the From system (FROMSYS) parameter only support *LCL.
Optical devices do not support software data encryption.
When saving document library objects (DLO) objects, such as documents (*DOC) and folders (*FLR), to optical media, separate Save DLO using BRM (SAVDLOBRM) commands or control group entries should be used to save DLO objects for each auxiliary storage pool (ASP).

BRMS has the same restrictions as the system save/restore commands.

Command	Supported by Optical Device
SAVSYS	DVD (No optical libraries)
SAVCHGOBJ of more that one library, including LIB(*ALLUSR)	DVD and optical library devices with UDF formatted media
SAVDLO of more than one ASP	DVD and optical library devices with UDF formatted media
SAVLIB of more than one library, including LIB(ALLUSR), LIB(IBM), and LIB(*NONSYS)	DVD and optical library devices with UDF formatted media
SAVCFG	All writable optical devices
SAVCHGOBJ of one library	All writable optical devices
SAVDLO of one ASP	All writable optical devices
SAVLIB of one library	All writable optical devices
SAVOBJ of one library	All writable optical devices
SAVSAVFDTA	All writable optical devices
SAVSECDTA	All writable optical devices
RSTCFG	All optical devices
RSTLIB	All optical devices
RSTOBJ	All optical devices
RSTUSRPRF	All optical devices