As embarassed as I am to admit this....I must confess that collation turned out 
NOT to be the problem (with all my scratch tapes disappearing) afterall.  
Instead, it would appear that I inadvertantly (or carelessly - whichever you 
prefer) deactiveated my 'Delete Volhist Admin Schedule' back in August 2002.  
After I deleted all the outdated volhist I went from 66 scratch to 285 scratch 
tapes.   Ahhh...to be yet again humbled by life....

But thanks to everyone for their responses I wouldn't have known to check/set 
Collation=NO on the copy storage pool (as it was set to YES) if it wasn't for 
you all.

So thanks again;
Theresa

>>> seay_pd AT NAPTHEON DOT COM 01/13/03 04:53PM >>>
How many tapes do you have in the tapepool?

Select count(*) from volumes where stgpool_name='TAPEPOOL'

How many drives do you have?

How many mounts are you getting during a stgpool backup?

Do you have maxpr specified on the stgpool backup?

What is the device class mount retention?

Are you using a maximum scratch number for tapepool or are you using private
volumes?

Send a:
q stg tapepool f=d
q devclass [device class] f=d
q stg copypool f=d

Also, run this select to see if you have a lot of private volumes in the
library but not owned by any storage pool.  This happens when a tape is not
labeled.

select volume_name from libvolumes where status='Private' and
libvolumes.volume_name not in (select volume_name from volumes) and
libvolumes.volume_name not in (select volume_name from volhistory where type
in ('BACKUPFULL', 'BACKUPINCR', 'DBSNAPSHOT', 'EXPORT'))

With this information I may be able to help show that the collocation is
maybe not the total culprit.

Paul D. Seay, Jr.
Technical Specialist
Naptheon Inc.
757-688-8180


-----Original Message-----
From: Theresa Sarver [mailto:tsarver.IFMC AT SDPS DOT ORG] 
Sent: Monday, January 13, 2003 4:06 PM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU 
Subject: To Collate or Not to Collate?


Hi All;

Environment:
SP Complex (7 wide nodes) running AIX 433 ML10
TSM 415
IBM 3494 (2-3590E drives)

When this was setup a couple years ago, they chose to enable collation, I
understand why - however, scratch tapes are now at a premium.  I would like
to know if I disabled collation if that would help to free up some
tapes...and can it be disabled on the fly?  Or is my only solution to start
trimming backups?

Also, our "tapepool to copypool" backup is now running over 24 hours.  Has
anyone else out there run into this problem before?  And if so - how did you
get around it?  Oh, and I'll save you the time...Management refuses to buy
another drive.  - Time to get creative!

Thank you for your assistance;
Theresa