Tape -Automatic Link Partition (ALP), User Specification (Doc ID 2148199.1)

Last updated on JULY 25, 2022

Applies to:

Purpose

Automatic Link Partition (ALP), User Specification 

Scope

Overview
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. In order 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.

Details

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