1. Administrator's Guide
  2. ACSLS Support of the SL8500
  3. Configuring Tape Drives to Support Your Workloads

Configuring Tape Drives to Support Your Workloads

How tape drives are configured in the SL8500 can minimize both elevator and PTP activity, while supporting your tape workloads. Strategies to use in determining where tape drives are located in the SL8500 include:

  • Cluster cartridges by workload, with enough drives to support the maximum drives needed for the workload. Separate the cartridges used by each workload on separate rails, and ensure the rail(s) dedicated to a workload has enough drives to meet the maximum concurrent mounts for the peak usage of the workload. Ensure that the rail has not only the tape cartridges for the workload, but also the scratch cartridges that will be needed.

  • Allocate separate rail(s) to each major application workload. This is because some applications, such as Symantic NetBackup and Tivoli, can use their own media and drives.

  • Clustering drives and media on a single rail works until the mounts per hour threshold is reached, all drives are in use, or there are too many active cartridges to fit on a rail. When the resources needed for a workload exceeds the capacity of a rail, spread the cartridges and drives over two or more rails.

  • Cluster drives by type, placing drives that use different media types on separate rails (LSMs). For example, place T9840 drives on one rail and T10000 drives on a different rail.

  • Configure your heavy tape applications so they will not exceed the performance limits of your library configuration.

  • Configure the SL8500 with 8 HandBots (two HandBots per rail) to provide redundancy. This allows you to always access the cartridges and drives that support a workload.