With regards to reading and writing on old tapes:

If you are using collocation then it is important to make all your current
tapes in the collocated pool read only. You will NOT be able to write to
tapes which have been written in 128 track format. I believe that if you
attempt to write to any of these tapes the tape will become read only or
unavailable (we upgraded over a year ago, and I don't remember which.).
Anyway, if I were you, after the conversion I would change all of you
collacted tapes access mode to read only. I would then increase the maximum
number of scratch volumes for the pool. Once this is done I would suggest
kicking of: 'move data <volume name> <stgpool name>' for each of the
volumes that you changed to read only. I used a ksh script with awk to get
the volume names that I wanted to process. Then I ran the scripts .....

P.S. Make sure you delete the drive definitions and recreate them for the
new drives, otherwise the new drive will write in the old 128 track format
...........

If you have any other questions you can contact me directly ..........

Cody Cauchi,  Systems Programmer, ITS
University of Windsor
401 Sunset Avenue
Windsor, Ontario
Phone - (519) 253-3000 x4435





                    "Tyree,
                    David"               To:     ADSM-L AT vm.marist DOT edu
                    <david.tyree@        cc:
                    SGMC.ORG>            Subject:     3590-B1A to 3590-E1A
                    Sent by:
                    "ADSM: Dist
                    Stor Manager"
                    <ADSM-L AT vm DOT ma
                    rist.edu>


                    04/04/2001
                    12:38 PM
                    Please
                    respond to
                    "ADSM: Dist
                    Stor Manager"






        We will be doing an update to our tape drives around the end of the
month. I've looked over the older messages concerning this and all I saw
was
a dilemma about microcode levels. The messages were dated the last part of
1999, so I would image that the microcode has been updated since then.
        Here's the situation, we are running (1) 3494 library with (2)
3590-B1A drives attached to an IBM Netfinity 7000 M10 server running WinNT4
SP5, TSM version 3.7.2.
        We currently have about 250 "J" tapes on hand and we will have
those
used up in about 60-90 days. That's why we are going with the newer drives.
We understand that they have 256 tracks on the new drives as opposed to the
128 tracks on the older ones. Thus doubling our tape capacity.
        Now the question, we have been told that the new drives will read
and write to our current "J" tapes just fine. They will read the 128 tracks
and then as we do our tape reclamations it will then write to the tape on
256 tracks. As we cycle in the older tapes in for reclaiming they all
become
256 track at some point. We generally have about 5-6 tapes a day go offsite
and about that many returning each day as well. Is this correct??
        I also understand the E1A drives will work the best if we go to the
newer "K" tapes, however you can't have "J" and "K" tapes in the library at
the same time for some reason.


David Tyree
Microcomputer Specialist
South Georgia Medical Center
229.333.1155

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