The Life Cycle of a Data Set

During production activity, data sets are constantly being accessed (mounted, opened, closed, kept, and so on). Control-M/Tape controls all media access behind the scenes in the following manner:

Job Initialization

The volume serial number can be changed by dynamic stacking.

Mount

Mount messages can be altered by Control-M/Tape to increase their relevance (for example, add pool name to mount messages).

Open

Checks are performed to ensure that the specified operation is valid for the mounted volume (for example, verification that the mounted volume is a scratch volume, verification that the mounted volume was allocated from the appropriate pool, verification that only EDM can write on EDM volumes).

Close

The Media Database is updated (for example, number of blocks in the data set, space used). Retention and vaulting periods are recorded in the Media Database.

Features provided by Control-M/Tape real-time operations include:

• Protection against overwriting data sets accidentally.
• Verification that mounted tapes are taken from the correct pool.
• Dynamic data set stacking.
• Statistics on all media operations (when volumes are mounted, opened, and closed).