Pseudo optical library concept

In addition to real optical libraries, OAM also supports the concept of pseudo optical libraries. The concept of pseudo libraries has changed from previous releases; however, pseudo libraries defined in previous releases are still supported.

Recommendation: Convert to the new pseudo library concept to allow more flexibility and customization within your storage environment. This conversion prepares you for the eventual elimination of the device type association restrictions required with previous pseudo libraries.

A pseudo library is a collection of optical volumes sitting on shelves and operator-accessible drives that these volumes can be mounted on. A pseudo library works like a real optical library, except humans instead of robots are moving the cartridges from the shelves to the drives. The controller for the 3995-Cxx library is a PC tower. The external drives are mounted in drive bays in the controller. You can attach one or more optical libraries to the controller.

The operator-accessible drives are physically attached to a real library controller, but logically belong to a pseudo library. For example, you could have three 3995-C3A controllers, each with six operator-accessible drives. You could map those eighteen operator-accessible drives in several ways:

Assign all eighteen operator-accessible drives to a single pseudo library.
Split the operator-accessible drives into three pseudo libraries, each containing six drives.
Assign twelve operator-accessible drives to one pseudo library and the other six drives to the second pseudo library.

An example of a configuration that is not valid would be to map fifteen drives to pseudo library #1 and map three drives to pseudo library #2. All the drives on any given controller must belong to the same pseudo library.