Need DRM to Manage Primary Pool

[bwhall2001]

I am a long time TSM administrator and consultant -

I recently implemented a B2D replicated solution using a dedupe DataDomain DD690 via NFS mount and using a FILE devc to hold all my Primary Storage Pools on the DataDomain. The DD690 replicates all my primary pools to my DR site on a second DD690 - and then also create a 3rd copy of only prod data to encrypted LTO4

Part of this solution is to replace the use of the Oracle TDPO to have Oracle RMAN backups write directly to the DD690 NFS mount point and bypass TSM all-together. Each Oracle host mounts up the same mount point on the DD690 which is replicated. The problem is that management wants all prod Oracle data to also have a tape copy, thus I also mount this same Oracle NFS mount point on my TSM server and back it up to a Primary LTO4 tape pool called ORAPRDTAPE. Considering I already have two copies of this Oracle data, (1) on my local DD690 and (2nd) on my remote DR DD690... then a third copy on a TSM Primary LTO4 tape pool ORAPRDTAPE, I do not want or need to then create a LTO4 copy pool for it to, but rather just eject the ORAPRDTAPE volumes.... now this is where the problem is... DRM will not manage a primary tape pool. I thought of simply using the ACCESS variable of a volume and after building my list of new ORAPRDTAPE volumes that are on-line in my volume, use CHECKOUT LIBVOL to eject them and set the ACCESS to OFFISITE but this is not allowed for Primary tape pools. My plan was then to write another script to search for ORAPRDTAPE volumes at an OFFSITE status but with pct_utilized = 0 to determine which ones are now empty and call those back to go in as scratch with the following query

select volume_name from volumes where stgpool_name = 'ORAPRDTAPE' and access = 'OFFSITE' and pct_utilized = 0

But since I can not use set the ACCESS to Offsite for a Primary tape pool that will not work - I was actually hoping that as soon as I ejected them that TSM would automatically set the ACCESS to Offsite but it leaves it as READWRITE which means TSM would still think it could mount the volume.

Now I am looking at using the LOCATION variable, which I can set to whatever I want, like "offsite" for example, to track where my tape is and determine which ones that are offsite and 0% utilized to call back (i.e. all data expired)... but before i went to far i wanted to see if someone had a better way.

I understand TSM strong desire and need to have primary volumes remain online but geeze - I am the customer and let me deal with that, what I really want is to have TSM allow me to add a Primary tape pool to the SET DRMCOPYSTGPOOL variable and process it even though it is not a copy pool. I can actually add ORAPRDTAPE to the DRMCOPYSTGPOOL variable but DRM ignores it - argh - Tivoli needs to change this as I have more and more clients lining up to for me to build this same config and want to avoid a complex script that is error prone if operators do not manage eject and return tapes correctly

Any ideas - sorry for the long winded post but figured a good explanation would be helpful

Thanks

 

[chad_small]

Since TSM wont allow DRM to manage primary pools you should use the MOVE MEDIA command and assign the tapes an overflow location. I use this periodically and it works well. It's as close as you'll get to a DRM type process.