We are currently struggling with a good strategy for doing this. Unfortunately, our QA environment is a bit smaller in size, so cannot just rsync from Prod to QA (not even sure that would work? Maybe so.). We do have more GDG instances in Prod than we would ever need in QA, but essentially we need to be able to move enough of the critical files over from Production to QA on a periodic basis so that we can test JCL/program changes in a more robust manner.
We did manage to build the directory structures, paths, user accounts, groups, etc. identically between Prod and QA early on with the hope that this might be possible to do down the road. We've even though of somehow restricting our data file copies to only those which have been accessed/modified/created in a given time-frame (although struggling a bit with getting that done), but then we are not sure whether (or how) we need to prune file mappings in the catalog file.
We are curious as to how other companies have solved this problem. Any insights would be greatly appreciated.
#mirroringrefreshcatalog
#EnterpriseServer
