Justin, I've experienced this on several occasions including having close to 1000 tapes outside of a 3494. Obviously, someone has miscalculated the size necessary to house all your primary storage pool volumes - the easiest solution is to bolt on a couple more 'S' frames on the ATL.
TSM will manage the tapes automatically outside of the ATL - there is no need to update their location as 'rack'. If needed, TSM will request a tape volume until the tape is checked in or the "mount wait" of the device class is exceeded. When put in the ATL, the tape is automatically checked in and used by TSM. If the mount wait is exceeded, the tape is then updated to "unavailable" and causes a restore/retrieve to fail and reclamation to move on to the next candidate tape. Predicting which tapes will be reclaimed can be a challenge, since TSM splits files and often needs a highly utilized tape to move a file segment. If you can identify a set of tapes which are full and not expiring too fast and they are not needed to often for restores, you can rotate them out of the ATL. I had the luxury of having tape operators monitor the requests, so we made it work until more slots were installed. That took a bit of training and documentation, but is fairly simple. Regards, - Paul Paul Thorson Levi, Ray & Shoup, Inc. Tivoli Specialist - LRS IT Solutions (217) 793-3800 x1704 -----Original Message----- From: Justin Bleistein [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Thursday, September 26, 2002 10:52 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: volume management in tsm We are in a bit of a pickle or soon will be anyway.... We have an IBM/3494 atl in our TSM environment. Which has about 1,000 slots in it. These slots are filling and fast. We're trying to make room for more scratch tapes. Now I've tried everything from "move data" to weird "reclaimation" sinareos. And we just can't seem to free up sificiant slots. I had an idea of ejecting all tapes which haven't been written to in a while there just waiting to expire, this way migration or backup storage pool processes won't call for them, and once they're out rack them in the data center and mark there location as: "rack". Now that will free up a ton of spots in the atl. The problem is how can TSM manage those tapes even though they are not in the ATL. I can check them in with check label = no, and just mark there location as: "rack" this way the database will keep updating them. The problem is what if reclaimation runs, now you can't do it because the tapes can't be mounted they're in the rack outside the atl. Unless the robot comes out to get them I don't see how this can work. It seems that trying to come up with a solution to the problem of lack of slots in the atl will just create more of a problem. Any thoughts? Or ideas? on how I can manage these tapes even though they can't be mounted?. P.S. = Yes it is collocated. Let me know if anyone has done this thanks!. --Justin Richard Bleistein
