A volume pool specifies a collection of individual volumes. This collection is used as archive media for an archive policy. As such, volume pools provide a useful method for assigning volumes and reserving volumes to archive policies.
You can use volume pools to define separate groups of volumes for use by departments within an organization, users within a group, data types, and other groupings. The pool is assigned a name, media type, and a set of volumes. A scratch pool is a set of volumes used when specific volumes in a volume association are exhausted or when another volume pool is exhausted.
If a volume is reserved, it is no longer available to the pool in which it originated. Therefore, the number of volumes within a named pool changes as volumes are used.
A volume pool definition requires at least three fields: the pool name, the media type, and at least one volume.