Most mainframe tape environments use only a small portion of their total tape capacity. For example, if a site has 3490 class, 36-track drives installed, each standard cartridge has an average capacity of 1.2 gigabytes (assuming an average of 3:1 compression capability for these drives). Most sites find that the average tape contains only 300 MB of data. Only 25% of the total tape storage capacity is being utilized. Increasing utilization to 75% would free up robotic tape library slots, reduce ejects, and inserts, and increase available scratch tapes.
Tape capacity utilization can be increased by implementing tape stacking or a technique called Tape Mount Management (TMM). However, a lot of extra management resources are consumed to aggressively stack tape data or to implement TMM. Not every application can utilize TMM. Job cancellations or extended delays can be experienced with stacked tapes. Some applications do not support certain data sets being changed from tape to DASD.
CA Vtape provides automatic tape stacking without the need for extra management resources and without job cancellations or extended delays due to concurrent access to the same tape. By emulating tape hardware, no limitations exist as to which applications can be changed to use CA Vtape.
CA Vtape maximizes the effectiveness of tape automation and minimizes tape library slot management.
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