TSM DRM States and Cycling process

DRM States:

There are six important states in DRM concept.
mountable

Tapes are inside tape library and therefore mountable into tape drives
Courier

Tapes are outside library now and can be handed over to courier service guys so that they can deliver tape cartridges to offsite.
Vault
Tapes are inside vault now at DR site

4.Vaultretrieve
Tapes are expired as they do not contain any valid data now. These tape cartridges can now be retrieved from vault.

5.Courierretrieve
Tapes with expired data have been retrieved from vault by courier guys but still not delivered at main site.
6.Onsiteretrieve
Tapes with expired data has reached main site and can be checked in , into tape library as scratch cartridges.



Daily ( or weekly) Cycle:
Depending upon your business needs, you may decide to remove offsite tape cartridges on daily or weekly basis.
There are two ways to do that. Simpler way is to use ISC console, while more typical way is to use dsmadmc command line tool to identify and remove offsite cartridges.

Let start with ISC first.
Login to ISC as iscadmin and identify DRM cartridges with mountable state. These are the cartridges, which are eligible for movement
You have to remove these cartridges from library by changing their state to next state, which is courier state.
After tapes reach DR site vault, you can change these tape cartridges state to Vault.

Once data on the tape cartridges in vault expired, the state of tape cartridges will automatically change to Vaultretrieve. You have to query from ISC or command line to find out which tape cartridges are in state of Vaultretrieve. Once you found out which tape cartridges are to be brought back, you have to ask your courier service to bring these tape cartridges back.
Once you know that your expired cartridges have been picked up by your courier service, you have to change state of these tape cartridges to Courierretrieve through ISC or command line.

Now when you get these expired cartridges back at main site, you just have to change the state of these cartridges to Onsiteretreive. As soon as you change the state to Onsiteretreive, history of these cartridges will be deleted from TSM and then you can check in these cartridges, one by one into tape library as scratch cartridges.