We have two tape pools, one collocated, the other not (to help minimize
tape mounts).

But a recent restore took over 60 tape mounts.  I'd like to try to
minimize that however I can.  Any suggestions?

Export/Import is not a helpful suggestion.  An Export of just one of
our medium sized servers (a Preview!) took much of a weekend.  We have
50 or more such servers.

I have come up with one operation that seems like goodness (in our
operation).  Our normal data flow is

   client --> adsm server disk --> adsm server tapes

Unfortunately, ADSM automatic reclamation goes from a volume to another
volume in the same pool.  For a non-collocated pool, this causes data
from many clients to be placed on any one tape.  One also needs 2 tapes
for any reclamation event.  These reclamations also tend to happen
when you don't want them, unless you monkey with the reclamation
limit.  For example, on my system they happen in the middle of a
weekend night ... right after EXPIRE INVENTORY, a long-running
process.  :-)

The solution (I am building) is to turn off reclamation and use a
separate service machine to do MOVE DATA for under-utilized tapes, back
to the "adsm server disk" rather than to another tape.  This lets us do
the maintenance when we want to, to automatically report on scarce
resources (almost full DB, not many EMPTY tapes, etc), to have just one
tape mount per reclamation, and to keep a client's data together as
much as possible by ADSM intelligently migrating client data from the
disk to tape pool(s).

I think we'd really like to be able to treat "active" files differently
from "inactive" files to keep volume restore times to a minimum.
Anyone doing anything in this area?  IBM?

cheers,
wayne

Wayne T. Smith               mailto:wts AT maine.maine DOT edu
Systems Group -- CAPS        University of Maine System