Not Dead Yet? Expiration and Deletion in z/OS Disk and Tape

Datasets, like other organisms, have a life cycle – they are born, live, grow in size, retire, and eventually die. That is, in z/OS, they are created, opened, read and written, archived, and eventually expired and deleted. The last of these stages, expiration and deletion, ensures that obsolete data is removed when its time comes and does not take up valuable storage space or get improperly used.

Expiration processing in z/OS involves not only expiration datasets for individual disk files, but also the DFSMS subsystem and DASD management systems such as DFSMShsm and FDRABR. For tape datasets, tape management systems keep close track of expiration – volumes must be expired as well as individual files (and may be ‘reborn’ as scratch tapes), with many different variations on when expiration occurs.

View this on-demand webinar to learn when and how datasets and volumes expire, and what happens when they do.