By implementing the tape mount management methodology, you can improve tape utilization and greatly reduce the number of tape mounts required for tape output data sets.

The volume mount analyzer reviews your tape mounts and creates reports that provide you with the information you need to effectively implement the recommended tape mount management strategy.

With tape mount management, you can have your ACS routines redirect the data sets that are targeted to tape and have them written initially to a designated DASD storage group. Later, the data sets can be migrated collectively to ML2 tape, enabling your installation to use the full storage capacity of your tape cartridges. At the same time, instead of having one tape mount for each tape output data set, you have one tape mount per quantity of data equal to the logical capacity of your tape cartridge. Not only is less time spent mounting tapes, or waiting for tape mounts, there is less tape drive contention, which can speed the processing of other jobs requiring tape resources.

For example, if your tape cartridge held an average of 100 output data sets and you were using tape mount management, you would have 10 output tape mounts per 1000 output data sets. If you were not using tape mount management, you would have 1000 output tape mounts per 1000 output data sets. The reduction in tape mounts for your installation could be significant.