I don't have much in the way of Unix knowledge, so perhaps this response isn't
all that valuable, but I will put in my $.02 worth; you can take it for what
it is worth.

First, you need a minimum of 2 drives for reclaims to work.

My recommendation would be for 4 drives, two in each silo.  (as a minimum,
more might be better)  I would split the drives evenly between the two silos
to help minimize passthrough operations (assuming that under AIX the mounts
will still take place on the drive closest to the slot the tape is stored in,
as it does on MVS....)

One variable here is how much data do you expect to change each day.  This
will have an effect on the relcaims whe the expirations are running.  If your
servers are highly active, or if you have a lot of large datasets that change
each day, then the reclaims will add up.  Since each reclaim takes 2 drives,
if you want other processing to move smoothly, or to run 2 reclaims at once,
then 4 drives would be a good idea.

JerryLawson
jlawson AT itthartford DOT com


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Author: INTERNET.OWNERAD
Subject: Reccomended # of tape drives???
05-23-96 02:41 PM

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