You can specify how a file is to be managed throughout its lifecycle to improve the use and balance of premium and inexpensive storage. You can move files among storage pools and delete files automatically using policy scripts.
The file-management policy contains a set of movement and deletion rules that are based on the file characteristics, such as storage pool, fileset, last-access date, and size.
The rules in a file-management policy are evaluated in order until the condition in one of the rules is met. If a rule applies, the data for the file is then either moved to the specified storage pool or it is deleted, depending on the action requested by the rule. If none of the conditions specified in the rules is met, the file is left alone.
Rules in a policy are evaluated only when you run the policy scripts. You can run the scripts automatically on a regular schedule using the UNIX® cron tab command. The scripts must be run from the master metadata server.
After a file has been created, you can check its storage pool assignment using the statfile command from the administrative command-line interface.
You can also run the script in planning mode to determine which files would be moved or deleted by the script. You can then optionally edit the plan and pass it back as input into the script.
Parent topic: Storage management