Physical volume pooling

Using outboard policy management support, you can manage logical volumes much more easily and efficiently by grouping volumes that have common characteristics on a set of physical stacked volumes, providing volume affinity. This group of stacked volumes is known as a physical volume pool. Common characteristics can include expiration dates, off-site disaster recovery data, backup copies, and so on. Physical volume pooling provides your installation with the following capabilities and benefits:

It allows you to accurately charge for storage management services that is based on the number of physical stacked volumes that are allocated for a particular enterprise.
It ensures that you can reserve groups of physical media for specific uses or owners.
It enhances adherence to security policies by grouping data for different divisions or areas of an enterprise.

Use the library manager storage group policy construct to assign logical volumes to physical stacked volumes and to group sets of stacked volumes into physical volume pools. The VTS system writes the logical volumes that are assigned to this storage group to the set of physical volumes that are assigned to the physical volume pool.

If you do not specify a physical volume pool in the library manager storage group policy construct, the VTS system writes the volumes to the common scratch pool. If you update the library manager storage group policy construct to allow for the assignment of logical volumes to a specific physical volume pool, the VTS does not move the data to the specified pool until the next time you rewind and unload the logical volume from the tape drive.