A strange situation LTO5 tapes being reclaimed to LTO2 volumes

[rallingham]

I have a strange situation going on with a customer. I installed a new tape library for them with 4 LTO5 tape drives. The old library has two LTO2 tape drives and holds very few tapes. The customer wanted to keep the old library and add the new one. So far there is no problem here, both libraries are defined and each has it's own device class and it's own storage pools. The LTO2 library has an Offsite tape pool called OFFDATA. The LTO5 library has a similar pool called OFFDATA5. Very similar names but that should not matter.
The customer contacted me and sent me a screen shot or two showing the LTO5 tape mounted for reclamation as the input volume. The output volume was LTO2 tapes, in a different library. Is there a way to stop this.
If you look at the process that was running you see that the OFFDATA reclaim job was running and how it got an LTO5 tape in that storage pool is beyond me. One thing to note here, there are no onsite or in library storage pools with Tapes. All data goes to a large disk array set up as a FILE device class. The offsite processing backups up the FILE pool to the OFFDATA5 pool now. Before it went to the LTO2 tapes. Eventually the LTO2 tapes will expire but the customer wants to use the LTO2 tapes for DB backups and the odd monthly backup.
I have gone through the logs and I cannot see how the LTO5 volume got associate with the OFFDATA copy pool.
Has any one seen this before? Any advice?

 

[moon-buddy]

The only explanation I can think of is that TSM picked up a LTO5 tape since it cannot get hold of any other tape for scratch.

 

[rallingham]

You may be correct here. Prior to the LTO5 volume being used, the customer ran out of scratch tapes in the LTO2 library. Thanks for the response.

 

[rallingham]

After looking at this again, it was an LTO5 volume that was being reclaimed and the data went to output tapes that were LTO2. So running out of scratches in the LTO2 Library could not be an issue. I am still stumped by this.

 

[sergio.morales]

Can you send us info like details of the storagepools in question "Q stg XXX f=d" ? I'd like to know if you have the nextpool setting set on these pools . . .

 

[sjl]

I'd like to know if you have the nextpool setting set on these pools . . .

Or the RECLAIMSTGPOOL setting. Without knowing more, that's the first thing I'd be checking.

 

[shawndo]

The only way this could happen is if data currently in the LTO2 primary pool was backed up to the LTO5 offsite pool via backup-stg. Even if the command was run accidentally just once.
I highlight "currently" because the data might have been in another pool when the backup-stg was run, but somehow migrated/moved to this one.

 

[rallingham]

The data was backed up from a file storage pool to the offsite LTO5 pool. There are essentially no onsite tape pools as the customer has a good sized array to handle all the nightly backup data for about 30 days. So the file pool data was backed up to the offsite storage pool and then a reclaim started and it reclaimed the data to the LTO2 tapes which are in a different library. It still seems strange to me.
There are separate storage pools for each library, separate device classes for each library and that should be fine. It is still happening as far as I can tell.

 

[shawndo]

There are essentially no onsite tape pools

I'm not clear here. There must be an LTO2 primary pool in order for the reclamation to use tapes from it for the LTO5 reclamation. Is there any overflow at all, i.e is there anything in the "NEXT storage pool" for the onsite file storage pool?

Maybe providing a "q stg" might help. and a description of the daily backup-stg commands

 

[rallingham]

There are two libraries. One has 2 LTO2 drives and it does have a primary pool, but that is used only for the DB backups, before I put in the new library with LTO5 drives. The LTO5 library does offsite processing only as there is no primary pool for LTO5 tapes, only the offsite pool. The LTO2 primary pool is used for DB backups from the first library as using an LTO5 tape for this is wasteful to the customer. So the question still remains. I believe I did set up the LTO2 pool to overflow to LTO5 but I will have to double check this, as I haven't been back to the customer for a couple of weeks now.