It was surely needed the minute IBM Corp sold its second mainframe into a user site, but some 30 years later Amdahl Corp claims to be the first to market with its Transparent Data Migration Facility, TDMF. The software apparently eliminates all down-time when migrating data in System/390 environments. TDMF claims to be the first non-proprietary data migration system. It enables data to be transfered between any two storage devices, as long as they are of similar geometry, regardless of the vendor or model. Data can be transferred at any time, without bringing the system down and without affecting other users on the system, even during periods of peak usage, Amdahl says. During data transfer, users can continue to work on the source data. TDMF logs any transactions taking place during the transfer to another storage volume, and automatically updates the target volume at the end. It then enables dynamic transfer to the target volume with no down time at all. Where more than one machine is sharing the same disk, TDMF runs as master on one and as slave on the others, to pick up all transactions from all processors. The initial license fee for the software is $60,000 per single CPU, and tiered pricing is available. The license includes on-site installation and 24 by 7 telephone support from Amdahl’s worldwide customer support centers.
