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Tape Drive Placement
Some ways tape drives can enhance performance of the library are by:
•
Grouping tape drives by type on the same LSM.
•
Keeping compatible media and drives on the same LSM.
•
Allocating LSMs to support specific application workloads.
•
Maintaining free cells on each LSM to support dismounts using the float
option.
Evenly distributing the tape drives across all four rails is not necessarily the
best approach. In fact, this can increase pass-thru activity by the elevator
which may decrease overall performance of the library.
Instead:
•
Identify the requirements of each major application workload.
•
Configure the library according to those requirements.
•
Install the tape drives where they provide the most benefit.
These requirements could indicate that:
•
Tape cartridges can be archived to a rail without tape drives.
A suggestion would be to use the top rail for these scenarios.
Example: inactive volumes, least recently used (LRUs) volumes, or
volumes that require few enter and eject operations.
•
All 16 tape drives are needed for heavy-usage tape drive applications.
Example: high use, high activity production jobs, and back up applications.
•
Arranging smaller groups of drives for special applications.
Examples are virtual mounts for VSM—a virtual tape storage subsystem
(VTSS) only uses 8 tape drives concurrently.
•
Application-specific requirements may separate drive-types.
Example: placing T9840 access-centric tape drives on one rail,
and T9940 capacity-centric tape drives on another.
TM0017 • Revision B
SL8500 Architecture
Chapter 1 SL8500 Architecture 27
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