TSIDDTD Leaves Unused Scratch on Drive

Products

• EPIC Fastcat VSE
• EPIC for z/VSE

Issue/Introduction

I have a z/VSE 6.1 system with CA-EPIC 5.2 00 1009 SKX. I have a job that copied an ATL/VTS virtual tape to an EMC DLm7100 virtual tape. When the job executes, an output scratch tape is mounted right away by the EMC DLm7100. However, the TSIDDTD job does not utilize that first scratch tape mount. The job continues, a 2nd output scratch tape is mounted, and the job concludes normally. This leaves the first scratch tape mounted on the virtual drive unused. This required a manual EP RUN to unmount.

ESP104=YES option is set during EPIC initialization for the ATL.

Is there something similar for the EMC DLm? 

Environment

Running on a z/VSE 6.1 system with EPIC 5.2 and using EMC DLm7100 virtual tapes.

Resolution

Configuration changes needed.

On our z/VSE 6.1 system (with EPIC 5.2),  we changed AUTOSTP=YES to AUTOSTP=NO.
Then ran a TSIDDTD with ATL/VTS input and DLM output, no issues. Good results!

On our VSE/ESA 2.3 system (with EPIC 5.1), we changed AUTOSTP=YES to AUTOSTP=NO.
Then ran a TSIDDTD with ATL/VTS input and DLM output, no issues. Good results!