> We do monthly archives on our servers that eventually wind up being stored on
> tapes in our library. Is there a way to identify only those tapes in the
> storage pool that contain information prior to a certain date?

Not easily.  You can use "query content" or "select ... from contents
where volume_name = 'name'" to make educated guesses.  These tables
are very large and cumbersome to work with if you have a lot of files
stored.


> If the answer is yes, an example would be appreciated. Also, how would I moved
> these tapes out of the storage pool so that I could add new scratch tapes to 
> my
> library?

You could adopt one or both of these strategies:

(a) create a separate tape-based pool for your archives and set the
"next storage pool" for your ARCHIVEPOOL to the tape pool.  The
archived files then go onto physically separate, easily identifiable
tapes.

You can have multiple storage pools defined in one physical library.


(b) Check out the least recently read and full tapes when you need to
put in more scratch tapes.  We use this SELECT to identify these
tapes:

    select
        volume_name, last_read_date
    from
        volumes
    where
        status = 'FULL' and
        volume_name in (select volume_name from libvolumes)
    order by
        last_read_date


Or you could use the last-written date.



> I would also need to be able to readd these tapes back into the
> storage pool if a retrieval was required.

You can't remove a tape from a storage pool... but you can remove it
from the library.

When ADSM wants a tape it will start issuing a mount requests to have
it checked back in.  You can set up a console terminal to run "dsmadmc
-mount" to watch the mount requests.  We have that as well as a
process that emails the duty operator to check in the tape.
process that emails the duty operator to check in the tape.


Russell