Does anyone have much experience with active storage pools? My current customer isn’t allowed to reclaim tapes, so their inventory of primary storage volumes is much larger than their ATL. This makes client restores prone to failure because of the number of primary volumes that need manual intervention as well as the lack of routine operational support at the site.
I’m considering creating an active storage pool. Once fully populated, its tapes would remain in the ATL; mere primary volumes would be on-site but not in the ATL. I know I can start to create it by defining an active data pool to be written to as primary tapes are being written to (we already use this for copy volumes), but there’s still the matter of copying into the active pool the active data on the existing primary storage volumes. Is there any way to build the active storage pool in phases, such as “all the data that’s four weeks old or younger” or “all the data on volumes that are available; don’t flinch at volumes that don’t mount”? Otherwise, the COPY ACTIVEDATA process is going to run 24x7 for a long, long time. If I cancel an COPY ACTIVEDATA command and then start a new one, does it correctly understand what it no longer has to copy? Do reclaims of active data storage pools rely upon EXPIRE INVENTORY running regularly? We haven’t been running EXPIRE INVENTORY out of an abundance of caution to avoid any risk that we lose track of an inactive object someone might demand from us, but I suspect we’ll need EXPIRE INVENTORY to keep the active pool correctly populated. I can imagine how to set the retention policies to mimic not running EXPIRE INVENTORY, but that still might make Some People nervous. Thanks to Wanda’s tip about EXPORT NODE a couple of weeks ago, I think I know how large (roughly) my active data pool would be if I create it and populate it. What am I forgetting? Is my plan fatally flawed? TSM Server 6.3.4, if it matters. Thanks, Nick