August 2016 Automatically Linked Partitioning 273
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Automatically Linked Partitioning
Today, tapes hold hundreds to thousands of gigabytes of data. Typically, the data is
"stacked" on the media as different data sets and each data set has different
expirations. When the expiration occurs, there is wasted space on the tape. Over time
the wasted space becomes large enough where customers must reclaim the tape,
which can consume many hours. To save our customers time and money, a method to
capture the wasted space had to be created, hence Automatically Linked Partitioning
(ALP). The tape drive created a hard disk like format such that more of the tape can
be used. Tape partitioning (Non Linked) has existed for many years, however many
of today's tape drives don't implement them because developers didn't think they
were useful. This implementation goes beyond partitions and creates automatically
linked partitions where the data can span across ALPs and be non-contiguous on
tape. Furthermore the tape drive handles much of this formatting without host
intervention.
The ALP feature is available only on the T10000B and T10000C and T10000D drives.
It is not available on the T10000A drive. The ALP feature supports IDR (In-Drive
Reclamation) and TTA (Tape Tiering Accelerator).
The T10000B tape format has 192 ALPs.
The T10000C tape format has 480 ALPs.
The T10000D tape format has 600 ALPs.
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