EMC Networker allocating too many tapes to a pool

First of all - disable tape AMM (Auto Media Management). This has been implemented about 25 years ago to help non-educated users (for example, a secretary) avoiding necessary steps like labeling etc. The Idea was that (s)he just had to swap a daily backup tape in the drive and let NW do all the rest automatically.

Also - make sure that you use a non-rewind tape drive which you will recognize by the device name (it ends with a 'n'). If not, NW will rewind and eject the media at the end of a save set.

I would like to avoid necessary labeling tasks as we go through approx 30 tapes a months just for our monthly backups. This was working ok before upgrading to this version. Its a SL3000 jukebox. Just because a feature is old, doesn't mean you shouldn't use it and should still be supported.

Before you starting to complain, please make sure to tell the whole story so that anybody could help to the best of his knowledge. We just cannot lookup your environment - we have to judge on the input you provide.

So you do have a jukebox and not standalone drives. Important to know. But did you also know that there are 2 AMM attributes? - one for the jukebox and one for each device. And it is definitively not a good idea to set both of them at the same time. I do not know whether this is the case in your environment and why this has happened but it is definitively worth to double-check the settings.

BTW - AMM will only use new tapes if there is no recyclable tape available (from the same or another pool, depending on your recycle settings). So you better check the tape status as well.

Of course, you might have a situation where you need to recover from an appendable tape of the same pool while a backup is also pending. In this case, NW will use another tape to proceed the backup as fast as possible.

There is still a potential issue of a software bug but it is hard to tell without knowing what exactly is going on.

AMM is enabled on the library but not on the individual tape device.

The daily retention policy is set to 6 weeks for that pool.