A couple of comments about what Wanda said about collocation and VTL's: At some point, you do have a finite number of mount points defined for your VTL. Even if virtual tape "mounts" are near instant, there is still some overhead. A large number of clients "mounting" virtual tape after virtual tape after virtual tape will have some sort of negative effect on the overall throughput of their sessions. I'm not saying it will be significant, but it could get there, depending on the VTL technology. A few milliseconds here, a few there, and a controller that gets bogged down under the mount request queue, you could cause yourself some issues.
And don't forget that virtual tapes are the same as physical tapes in one major factor - they're sequential! So non-collocated storage pools could have multiple clients asking for the same virtual tape, so there would be a wait queue for the virtual tape. A VTL doesn't resolve this type of contention, as it's at the TSM level. I would argue that the cost of creating collocated volumes in a VTL is negligible, and still has benefits on the restore side. To echo a number of others comments in the thread - if you don't plan it out right, it's not going to work. That goes for just about anything, from vacations to VTL's! Nick Cassimatis ----- Forwarded by Nicholas Cassimatis/Raleigh/IBM on 06/11/2007 01:33 PM ----- > And you don't have to collocate in a VTL, since there is > zero effective tape mount time.