Outboard policy management enhancements for VTS tape libraries allow you to more effectively manage your physical and logical tape volumes. This support utilizes the names of the existing SMS management constructs: storage group, management class, storage class, and data class. You use the ACS routines to assign the eight-character construct names, which are then passed to the library at mount time. The construct names and actions are defined outboard using the library manager.

The assigned constructs, which are policy names stored by the library, become attributes of the tape volume. A VTS then manages a tape volume according to the volume's assigned policy names and the actions associated with the policy names. The policy names and their associated actions are defined at the library.

With the outboard policy management capability, you can use the library manager storage group policy to specify a stacked volume pool for a group of logical volumes, thus giving you the ability to manage the volumes by groups. This is known as physical volume pooling. You can also implement selective dual copy capability by defining a secondary stacked volume pool through the library manager management class policy. Using the library manager management class, you can determine whether the PtP VTS makes a volume's copy immediately or defers it. Additionally, using the library manager storage class, you can define a cache preference level for a volume. This indicates the length of time that volume remains in the tape volume cache, thus improving mount response time.

Related reading: For more information on outboard policy management, see z/OS DFSMS OAM Planning, Installation, and Storage Administration Guide for Tape Libraries.