It depends.
First: there are three tape drive flavours:
1. ATL IBM (3494, TS3500, TS7700, VTS)
2. VTL or (former) ATL from other vendors
3. stand alone drives.
Ad 1. Define it in DFSMS, IODF, etc.
Ad 3. It is good old 3490E or MAGSTAR (or I had Jaguar, but it is rare
IMHO). That drive is manually operated and used mostly like floppy disk
drive or contemporary USB stick.
Ad 2. It is some automated library, virtual nowadays. No manual
operations for mounting tapes. However, in order to use DFSMS features
it can be defined as MTL. MTL was a library without robot. The purpose
of MTL today is z/OS cannot talk to other vendors robot/VTL, but it is
library as set of volumes and drives.
To answer your question: IT DEPENDS.
You did not provide details regarding your tapes. And BTW: you should
follow vendors recommendations.
BTW2: I read somewhere IBM statement saying MTL is not for vendors
purposes and use of it is somehow not fair. It wasn't clearly described
and I was >10years ago, so I cannot provide exact wording.
--
Radoslaw Skorupka
(looking for new job)
Lodz, Poland
W dniu 13.04.2021 o 20:02, Peter pisze:
Hello
Just curious about this parameter in IODF and I understand some of the tape
subsystem running in zOS needs this value to be defined in IODF.
Any specific reason why MTL=NO is required for the subsystem responsible
for tape backup (virtual )
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