Determining Your Tape Activity

To prepare for this step, collect 30 to 45 days of your SMF records and use them as input to the volume mount analyzer's extract program, GFTAXTR. Use a normal business day as the ending date for the SMF collection. Use the output from the extract program as the input to all later analyses. Be sure to include data for the peaks in your tape workload.

This step introduces you to the volume mount analyzer reports and gives you an overall picture of tape use. These reports include the following:

Estimate (EST) of your savings in tape mounts and volume counts as result of implementing the tape mount management methodology, and also the cost of additional DASD volumes for the DASD buffer
Gigabyte (GB) report, showing you the maximum gigabyte allocations by hour, to help you determine free space requirements for the tape mount management DASD buffer
Usage (USE) report, showing the maximum number of drives used concurrently over the sample period for your tape and cartridge subsystems
Top (TOP) report, showing you which applications are major tape users

You can use the following GFTAVMA keywords to produce the initial volume mount analyzer reports:

REPORT(EST,GB,USE,TOP)

Use these initial reports to determine a strategy for follow-on analyses needed to design your ACS routines and classes and size of the DASD buffer.