I'm growing increasingly interested in library sharing. Traditionally what
I'm used to are libraries where the drives are SCSI attached and the
robotics are controlled via serial or Ethernet. What I'm curious about is
how TSM shares drives. E.g. if I have a library with only 2 drives and
SERVER1 grabs both drives to do some tape reclamation - then along comes
SERVER2 who has a higher priority process like perhaps a user wants to
actually do a restore, is the system intelligent enough that SERVER1 knows
to let go of the drives to allow SERVER2 to use them?

What kinds of operational issues are there with sharing a library? Say I
want to have 5 TSM servers share a single library with 10 drives.. seems
reasonable to me but in practice considering the kinds of things each TSM
server has to do each day will they truly share the library nicely?

Gerald Wichmann
Sr. Systems Development Engineer
Zantaz, Inc.
925.598.3099 w
408.836.9062 c