A manual tape library is a set of tape drives and the set of system-managed volumes the operator can mount on those drives. The manual tape library provides more flexibility, enabling you to use various tape volumes in a given manual tape library. This support allows volumes to be associated with manual tape libraries so that only those volumes defined for a specific manual tape library can be mounted on drives in that library.

Unlike the automated tape library, the manual tape library does not use the library manager. With the manual tape library, a human operator responds to mount messages that are generated by the host and displayed on a console. This manual tape library implementation completely replaces the IBM 3495-M10 implementation. IBM no longer supports the 3495-M10.

See Setting up DFSMSrmm for the system-managed tape library for implementation details for these scenarios.