Introduction › Overview

Overview

CA MIA is the component of CA MIM that provides integrity when you are sharing tape devices among systems (or CPU images). This component also enhances z/OS device processing for tape devices. Use of this product requires a permanent channel path from each operating system to each tape drive that will be shared by those operating systems.

CA MIA improves device processing at your site by:

• Preventing jobs on different systems from concurrently allocating the same tape device and thereby compromising data set integrity. By protecting device integrity, CA MIA enables you to share tape devices among systems or images.
• Influencing device selection during the z/OS allocation process.
• Automating responses to allocation recovery messages issued by z/OS whenever a job cannot allocate a suitable online device.
• Capturing information about device activities through an application program interface.
• Improving operations for assignable tape devices by providing an easy way to activate the ACL feature on these devices.
• Providing an SMF report showing information about tape device usage using CA Easytrieve.
• Sharing remote tape devices between images.

Important! The term “assignable tape devices” refers to 3480, 3490, 3590, and any other compatible tape devices.

Note: If you are running z/OS systems as guests under z/VM, then you have multiple options for sharing a device among the guest systems using a single tape drive path. The available options are:

• The Autopath feature of CA MIA
• The Shared Tape Support feature of z/VM

For more information on the Autopath feature and Shared Tape Support, see z/VM Considerations in the chapter “Advanced Topics.

CA MIA is composed of two facilities:

• The Global Tape Allocation Facility (GTAF)
• The Tape Preferencing and Control Facility (TPCF)