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 Tape Movement using BRMS on a TS4300

Jim Clay's profile image
Jim Clay posted 06/08/26 08:06 PM

Hello BRMS helpers,  

First time users here...my apologies for the length.  We are using the BRMS supplied Move Policy of OFFSITE to move tapes from the internal tape slots (slots 1 - 35) to the I/O slots (36 - 38.   39 & 40 are allocated to another drive's library) .  For Seq 10, we have an OFFSITE location and the Duration is 28 days.  For Seq 20 we have the Location set to the tape library (TAPMLB01) and Duration is set to *EXP.   The Move Policy is attached to the Media Policy.  When the Move Policy is run daily, the tape used for the previous night's backup is moved to an I/O slot and then physically retrieved and moved to a different location.  Work with Media shows the correct location (OFFSITE) for that tape. That part is working fine.  However, we can't get expired tapes to move from the I/O slots into the internal tape slots after 28 days.  If we lower the Duration to 21 days, it moves Active tapes back to location TAPMLB01... even though those tapes are not physically present in the I/O slots (An error occurs in the job log that the tape volume was not found).

Also, it is possible that an expired tape may not make it to the I/O slots right when the 28 days are up and the tape expires, so we don't want BRMS to 'move' the location of the tape when the the tape is not there.  We have a weeks worth of tapes in the unit (in case someone forgets to put tapes in at any point), so we may put in 1 tape, or 2 expired tapes to catch up... and we put 3 expired tapes in on a Friday for the weekend, so it would be nice to move the expired tapes into the internal slots first, then move the recent backup tape to the I/O slot.  

Rich Malloy's profile image
Rich Malloy IBM Champion posted 06/10/26 03:19 PM

When you say the move policy is run daily..I assume you mean the MOVMEDBRM command ?  Is your move policy set to VERIFY Moves ? The only way that I know of to prevent BRMS from logically moving a tape into the library is to use the VFYMOVBRM command or equivalent. This 'forces' you to select which tapes you want moved. Otherwise, you get what you asked for..you told BRMS that the tape will stay offsite for 'x' if the tape isn't physically there it will still logically move it to the right location cause that's what the move policy says to do..So..if you want to avoid that..use VFYMOVBRM or in your move policy set it to verify  moves and then select which tapes you want moved. 

For us, when we have tapes come back from 'offsite' they are put back into the lib/ IO Slots...At that point, they will have a status of *INSERT. When the tapes are *INSERT, you can use the ADDTAPCTG command to get them back into the library. We have a script that runs every friday to find the tapes with an INSERT status and then based on that, it adds them back into the library slots. 

Hope some of this helps. 

Jean-Bernard MALET's profile image
Jean-Bernard MALET posted 06/11/26 05:55 AM

Hello Jim Clay,

as Rich Malloy indicates, when you use the VFYMOVBRM command, you haven't use the ADDTAPCTG after that.
 
Since you have insert previously the tape in a I/O slot, the command VFYMOVBRM execute automatically the insert process (in the category associated with the media class), places the tape in a empty slot and change the location in the BRMS inventory (you can view it with WRKMEDBRM).


Hope some of this helps.  

Jim Clay's profile image
Jim Clay posted 06/16/26 07:25 PM

Thank you to Rich and Jean-Bernard for responding to my question.  We will give the VFYMOVBRM command a try and see how that works.

Jim

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