> When we recently had DR the whole restore process was very slow due to the
> order that the files were retrieved from tsm.  Many extra tape mounts were
> done and it was a very tedious process.  A user came up with the following
> plan to reduce the number of tape mounts and speed up the recovery process.
> Is there another more efficient way of achieving the same goal?  This just
> seems like a lot of work to get the data back more quickly.  Any
> suggestions?
>
> The tsm server is on the mainframe at level 5.1.6.2 and most of the servers
> that this would be done for are sun solaris with oracle data.  Thanks!

The retrieve and restore functions both support the filelist option, which
specifies a file containing a list of file names to be restored. I have
used this option with restores. The resulting tape mount requests indicated
that the files in the list were sorted by location and restored in an order
that minimized tape movement (as far as I can tell, this behavior is not
spelled out anywhere in the TSM documentation, and can only be discovered
by experiment). I have never had occasion to use the filelist option with
a retrieve operation, but I suspect that it will cause sorting by location
in that context as well.