It might surprise you to know that the answer is yes, plain old FOS STORE can handle multiple tape drives. The STORESET parameter can be used to specify both sequential and parallel backups.

Sequential tapes are specified in this way

;STORESET = (*tape1,*tape2,*tape3,...)

This instructs STORE to use only one drive at a time from the specified serial pool for the STORE operation. It will select *tape1 first. When the first reel of tape is exhausted, STORE will shift to the next drive specified (*tape2), leaving the first free for rewinding and changing reels. Thus, at any given time, only one drive is occupied with the STORE operation. The effect is to accelerate the STORE process by eliminating waiting for a rewind and reel switch to occur. When STORE has written to the last specified device, it will wrap around to the first device.

Parallel devices are specified by

;STORESET=(*tape1),(*tape2),(*tape3)...

In this example, all three tapes will be used in parallel during the store.

Sequential and parallel can be combined as in

;STORESET=(*tape1,*tape2),(*tape3,*tape4)

In this example, two tapes would be storing at any particular moment.