We are using a VTS with the virtual tapes defined as 3490s, and we are using the recommended 'Mark TAPE Full' option. That's all well and good. It does, however, mean that there are a lot of 'tapes' and many of those may have a mixture of valid and no-longer-valid data sets - a call for Recycle. The VTS is probably under configured, but that's life, and its a financial institution so they keep everything for 7 years, and are paranoid about keeping things so there is really too much data floating around that has to continue to float around.
HSM can decide that it should do recycles, and if it does decide, then it will according to its built in algrorithm. However, we find that the algorithm makes decisions based on the WHOLE set of volumes that it knows about. That is OK, except that if there are a lot of huge data sets that have been migrated, and they used full tapes (and probably more than one tape). That skews the data to a higher than the overall usage figure, and it doesn't conclude that recycles are needed. We can of course initiate manual recycles but working out which ones to choose is a pain. So we are looking at writing something to automate that. We are looking at reading the OCDS and using that to select which volumes (eg excluding the big ones) and then issue the RECYCLE commands. It seems that HSM ought to be able to automatically do the selection of which volumes to do in a way that works for us. So the question is whether we can influence the recycle trigger point automatically to select what to recycle? e.g. tell it to ignore the full volumes and only assess based on the rest of the volumes or something like that. We used to have real tapes and it didn't matter if the algorithm resulted in few recycles, but with the VTS we need to release the space in the VTS to stay alive. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN