What does Tape Manager do?

Tape Manager provides several commands that allow you to perform many tape management tasks, such as adding tapes to or deleting tapes from system or private pools. With flexible retention control, you can specify an expiration date or a maximum retention period. You can even query important information about all of the tapes in the system.

Operations, such as backup and recovery, are facilitated by Tape Manager through dynamic creation and deletion of private tape pools. This enables the creation of a collection of tapes that are related to a specific job or function. Tape Manager facilitates tape operations by:

• Providing commands to dynamically create new private pools that can be defined to use scratch tapes from either another private pool or the system pool.
• Supporting dynamic definition of pools using LIKE and LIKEU options. The LIKE option allows a pool to be created with the same attributes of an existing pool. The LIKEU option performs the same operation as LIKE, but also replicates the user permissions of the existing pool.
• Allowing you to easily return all tapes from a failed backup to "scratch" status. Once a pool has been dynamically defined to contain the tapes related to a specific job, the tapes can be returned to "scratch" status by simply deleting the pool.

Tape Manager helps protect tape resources by:

• Verifying internal tape labels and appropriate access authority for tape requests.
• Providing authorizations to pool resources, attributes, and defaults.
• Notifying you when tape resources are in danger of running low or when tape catalog disks are approaching capacity.